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Some people are big on rice. For others it's pasta. But for me it's potatoes, and more specifically mashed potatoes with a big knob of butter or completely doused in gravy.

I like to serve sole meuniere with mashed potatoes, which I drizzle with brown butter and crispy fried capers. If I'm cooking brisket or lamb shanks or pot roast, I'll make mashers to soak up the sauce. And of course for roast turkey, which I make more than just once a year, I skip the sweet potatoes and double up on the mashed. 

In pursuit of the perfectly mashed potatoes, I once beat fluffy white potatoes into a paste, and then, mortified, served them to my assembled guests. Have you ever seen mashed potatoes repel gravy? 

I inherited a potato masher, one with a zig zag wire head, which I've read is not even as effective as those that sport a metal grid. But I think it's time for more drastic measures. I've been making a list of the kitchen tools I've lived without for just too long and along with the mandoline, I'm listing the potato ricer, the definitive tool, people tell me, for the perfect mashed potatoes.

Would you agree?

--Tracy Schneider

Alice in Wonderland has been a part of pop culture long before Tim Burton gave it his quirky touch. How many times have you heard someone’s smile described as a “Cheshire Cat grin” or used the expression “I fell down a rabbit hole” to explain getting lost? As Burton’s Alice enjoys a blockbuster opening, we look back at a few other film interpretations of the Lewis Carroll classic. P.S. Has this tale ever been just for kids? 

• Alice in Wonderland (1903): This B&W silent barely clocks in at nine minutes which was considered a “long” time for films back then. The 107-year-old film is ravaged by scratches, but it’s still watchable here. Director Cecil M. Hepworth’s prehistoric special effects are interesting. Check out when the camera pans back for Alice to “shrink” and the table next to her is replaced with a larger one.

• Alice in Wonderland (1915): This silent seems to drag on at 51 minutes long but it’s worth a brief look-see if only to appreciate how filmmaking matured in the 12 years since the first Alice. Costuming and sets stepped up a notch, too.

• Alice in Wonderland (1933): Paramount regulars added some star luster to this version with W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Cary Grant as Mock Turtle and Gary Cooper as the White Knight. But the stars were barely recognizable in their character makeup – alas, this didn’t help sell tickets. The film’s original run time of 90 minutes was sliced in half and it was redistributed as a series of  literary classics to be shown in ’50s and’60s classrooms. Oh, oh – that means “educational.”

• Alice in Wonderland (1951): Alice received the Disney animated touch, but the magic didn’t pay off with awards and box office receipts. Earlier animated tales such as Dumbo (1941),  Pinocchio (1940) and  Fantasia (1940) resonated with audiences and were hailed as instant classics. This Alice was re-released in the’60s and became popular with the counterculture youth who reveled in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge drug references. As Jefferson Airplane advised in their 1967 hit White Rabbit, “Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call.”

•  Alice in Wonderland: What is a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?(1966): This animated TV special from Hanna Barbera put a mini-skirted Alice into modern times. Even the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Sammy Davis Jr.) wears a beret and a hepcat goatee. Want a catchy song stuck in your head for the rest of the day? Give this cha-cha-ish number a listen in a clip from the show.

• Alice in Wonderland (1985): Produced by Irwin Allen, aka “Master of Disaster” thanks to his ’70s movie hits like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. This two-part TV special married Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The all-star cast included Sammy Davis Jr. (again – but as the Caterpillar this time), Ringo Starr, Sid Caesar, Martha Raye, Scott Baio and Sherman Helmsley.

• Alice in Wonderland (1999): This three-hour TV special was pure casting genius. Check it out: Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat, Miranda Richardson as the Queen of Hearts, Ben Kingsley as Major Caterpillar, George Wendt (Norm!) as Tweedledee, Martin Short as the Mad Hatter and Peter Ustinov as Walrus. It took home four Emmys, including a much-deserved one for special effects. See the trailer here.

Other notable Alice adaptations include:

• Alice in Wonderland (1966): Peter Sellers stars in this Alice filmed for the BBC along with John Gielgud. Music by Ravi Shankar. 
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972): Some critics say this version is more faithful to the Carroll original than others. With Peter Sellers (again!) Dudley Moore, and Fiona Fullerton as Alice.
• Alice (2009): Harry Dean Stanton? Tim Curry? Yep, and add Kathy Bates to the mix in this miniseries from the Syfy cable network.

- Francine Ruley

As a followup to my post last week about U.S. vs. U.K. covers, here's an advance look at one of the novels I'm most looking forward to this summer, David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The U.S. edition, which comes out in late June, is on the left, and the U.K. version, which comes out in May, is on the right. What do you think? I think they're both pretty ravishing--I loved the U.S. cover the moment I saw it, but I'm not sure: the U.K.'s might be even lovelier (and to be honest it makes the U.S. one look a little garish next to it). I look forward to seeing them in the flesh (well, the U.S. one at least, unless somebody sends me to London...).

I haven't cracked my advance copy of the book yet, but Jessica at Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore (and The Written Nerd) has. She opened it with trepidation, as Mitchell is her "Favorite Living Writer" (as he is for many, after Cloud Atlas)--what did she think? Well, there is one paragraph in her post in which every sentence begins, "I love ...". --Tom

I'm totally addicted to OK Go's brilliant video for "This Too Shall Pass." Every time I watch it, I discover a handful of new reasons to love it. Perhaps the most satisfying part of this video is the sheer number of times that the on-screen action coincides with the rhythms of the song, but let me not color your experience too much. Just watch it:

     --Jason Kirk

Spring is in the air! Here are a few things I can't stop thinking about. Many of them pretty, and one of them potentially life changing.

What are you lusting after?

--StellaCadente*

Follow me on Twitter @pomodorista

It all started with a gala swag bag. You know the ones that I’m talking about, full of stuff you will never use. This particular swag bag held a few tasty morsels tucked within the other “stuff”: pens, gift certificates, flyers and announcements, etc. Some of the hidden treasures includes a tasty organic local sustainable chocolate bar, the old time local candy I just love, and then there was this little clear plastic bag of three little packets of Bacon Salt, all tied together with a simple red string.
 
I tucked these in the kitchen drawer with all the other loads of “event spices.” The next day I looked around for a healthy snack and decided upon some 100 calorie pop corn, and as I opened the drawer for a sprinkle of  sea salt those little packets called out to me . . . Ba-con, ba-con, ba-con . . . and that’s how the addiction started.

I sprinkled a little of the salt on my popcorn and it was oh so d’lish! I found the perfect 100 calorie snack! My buddy Orville Redenbacker’s 100 calorie microwave pop corn adorned with my new best friend--bacon salt! It may be a little on the high sodium level, but that’s nothing a healthy diet and drinking a lot of water won’t correct! So popcorn and bacon salt--hmm, what else could my bacon buddy elevate in flavor?

A few days later, I perused through the kitchen for something sweet and savory. What I really wanted was a Fran’s sea salt topped chocolate covered caramels--oh such a sexy guilty pleasure! Unfortunately, I didn’t have any of those decadent treats so I resorted to something I do best, I improvised!

I looked through my gala swag bag to see what I could do with the other goodies. A Theo's Chocolate bar--JACKPOT! I broke a small portion into tiny chunks then placed it in a little ramekin along with a cut up piece of dried mango (another faboo snack from Costco) and, oh hell, why not, I sprinkled it with bacon salt. Sweet, savory salty--YUM, another tasty treat!

So what else might this salt of wonders be good on? Well, here’s what I tried it on next: seared scallops with edamame, pea shoots with a ponzu splash, and also hard boiled eggs (which I plan to sell at my Dish D’Lish airport cafes. It's a healthy and tasty protein alternative). And speaking of hard boiled eggs what about an egg salad sandwich mixed with bacon salt? Bacon salt foam on a triple agave lime margarita (YES!), sautéed veggies with just a mist of extra virgin olive oil (I like to watch it on the calories during the week), spinach and apple salad with fat free balsamic vinaigrette with bacon salt boost and healthy chicken and veggie kabobs for the grill . . . the possibilities are endless!

Be sure to check out The Bacon Cookbook--there are tons of fabulous recipes and bacon ideas in it. I have included a great cocktail recipe with a bacon garnish. The Bacon Freak website also has loads of bacon products so you can let the whole world know your own love for bacon!

I will be sure to keep you updated on my bacon salt adventures. By the way, I’ll take a pass on the bacon salt guys’ newest product--the bacon lip balm. It just makes me too hungry, though it may be a total man make out magnet!

Back a few months ago we here at Toy Whimsy were lamenting the fact that there were no Mad Men Action Figures.  Someone must have heard our cries of anguish - and that someone must have been Barbie herself.  In the New York Times today, there comes news of a Mad Men/Barbie agreement to be part of the publicity behind the new season.

Soon, the show will enter a realm of the pop-culture pantheon that its creator, Matthew Weiner, says has surprised even him: Mattel plans to bring out versions of Barbie and Ken styled after four “Mad Men” characters.

The dolls are part of a premium-price collectors’ series for adults that Mattel calls the Barbie Fashion Model Collection. Although there have been Barbies and Kens based on other TV series, among them “I Love Lucy” and “The X-Files,” the dolls will be the first licensed line for that collection, Mattel says, with a suggested retail price of $74.95 each.

Mattel is licensing rights to the characters from Lionsgate, the studio that produces “Mad Men” for the AMC cable channel. There will be 7,000 to 10,000 copies of each doll, to be sold in specialty stores and on two Web sites, amctv.com and barbiecollector.com.

The characters to become dolls are Don Draper, the show’s leading man; his wife, Betty; his colleague at the Sterling Cooper agency, Roger Sterling; and Joan Holloway, the agency’s office manager who was Roger’s mistress. 

Here's a little sneak peek at the dolls:

My birthday is in July.  I see a set of these for my desk in my future!

This partnership shouldn't be too much of a surprise seeing the success Barbie is having with the Twilight series.  So what is next?  I'd love to see some True Blood Barbies.  What pop culture Barbies would you like to see?  Leave us a comment!

--Laura M.

The Real Doc Ford:  Author Randy Wayne White broke bread with the Boston Globe this week at Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar & Grille, a real-life restaurant crafted in the spirit of his bestselling Doc Ford series. 

"While White describes himself as a silent partner, his influence...is evident, from the flavors of South and Central America, which he used to write about as a columnist for Outside magazine, to the menu items named for characters in the Doc Ford mysteries."

White's latest book, Deep Shadow, published this week.

The Book on Brown: New Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has signed a deal with HarperCollins to publish his memoir in early 2011.  The book will focus on Brown's "family background, his early career, and his ascent to the office of Massachusetts senator."  And, as USA Today points out, readers should "expect a lot of talk about the now-famous pickup Brown drove during his campaign to replace the late Ted Kennedy."

Tuscan Dreams: Under the Tuscan Sun author Frances Mayes sits down with CNN to talk about her newest book, Every Day in Tuscany, and love for Italian life.

Moving and Shaking:  Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg's The Smart Parent's Guide: To Getting Your Kids Through Checkups, Illnesses, and Accidents may not publish until next week (March 16), but that hasn't stopped it from ranking among the top titles on our Movers & Shakers list this afternoon.

M.A. Orthofer serves as the managing editor for the truly omnivorous and wonderful book review website The Complete Review. Orthofer also recently helped judge the University of Rochester's Best Translated Book Award, the winners of which in fiction and poetry will be announced tonight (check here for the results).

Here are the ten finalists in the fiction category:

César Aira, Ghosts. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Argentina, New Directions)

Gerbrand Bakker, The Twin. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. (Netherlands, Archipelago)

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Anonymous Celebrity. Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira. (Brazil, Dalkey Archive)

Hugo Claus, Wonder. Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. (Belgium, Archipelago)

Wolf Haas, The Weather Fifteen Years Ago. Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen. (Austria, Ariadne Press)

Gail Hareven, The Confessions of Noa Weber. Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu. (Israel, Melville House)

Jan Kjærstad, The Discoverer. Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. (Norway, Open Letter)

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future. Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull. (Russia, New York Review Books)

José Manuel Prieto, Rex. Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. (Cuba, Grove)

Robert Walser, The Tanners. Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Switzerland, New Directions)

I thought it would be a good time to talk to Orthofer via email about translated fiction, the award, and The Complete Review's role in highlighting translated fiction...

Amazon.com: How did you become a judge for the University of Rochester’s Best Translated Book Award?

M.A. Orthofer: I've known organizer Chad Post for ages, from his time first at Dalkey Archive Press and now at Open Letter, and was an enthusiastic supporter of his invaluable translation database project--tracking all the new translations of works of fiction that appear in the US every year--from the start. As the prize evolved out of that I guess I sort of got pulled into it as well.

Amazon.com: What was the experience like for you? How many books did you read, for one thing, and from how many countries?

M.A. Orthofer: Fortunately, the prize didn't really require me to do much additional reading--for the overwhelming most part these were books I wanted to read, and had planned on reading (and, more often than not, reviewing at the Complete Review), in any case. So for me it wasn't too different--at least until the final stages--from just doing what I would be doing anyway.

Of the eligible books (around three hundred) I would guess I read and reviewed about a hundred, and at least took a closer look (ranging from reading the whole thing to giving up after thirty pages) at close to another hundred. (There were enough judges so that we tried to have at least one person take a look at each eligible book, allowing us to weed out the least promising titles so that not everyone had to waste their time considering books that obviously had no chance of being in the running for the longlist. And, yes, there were quite a few of those.)

I'm not sure how many countries were represented in my reading, but the ten titles on the shortlist are by authors from ten different countries, and I think the twenty-five shortlisted authors came from twenty-four different countries (with only Argentina represented twice). Much of the world is covered, though there are still some very under-represented areas, especially in Asia. I don't think there was a single title for us to consider that was translated from either Urdu or Hindi, for example, (which I found shocking and disappointing) and only a small handful from all the South-East Asian languages.

Amazon.com: To what extent can you forgive a bad translation of a good book? And can you see the quality peeking through?

M.A. Orthofer: A bit of forgiveness is always necessary: the process of translation always seems to entail some (and often a lot of) loss, and there are many days and books where I think it's only a matter of...degrees of badness. My personal preference is for a more literal translation, where you can 'hear' the original (language) through the translation, as it were, even if that can sound awkward in English. Most publishers and editors (and, I guess, translators) prefer to English (or Americanize) the texts, which I suppose makes them more readable--though when the approach goes wrong the results can be pretty disastrous. (What I find more problematic, however, is when there is more extensive editorial interference at the translation stage, and books are 'reshaped' (generally by trimming away a lot) for the English-language market--Wang Gang's English is one example from last year's crop of books.)

The bulk of the translations we considered were of a relatively high quality, certainly once we got down to the 25-title-strong longlist; I think they all read well in English. Along the way there were some truly terrible translations, but those weren't really in the running. I don't think any really good books lost out just because of the translation (though certainly poor translations didn't help their causes)--but I also think some of the more accomplished translations didn't make the shortlist because our decision-making wasn't solely based on the quality-of-translation. As to quality peeking through bad translations: I like to think that I can sense some shimmer when it's there, but I think in those cases there has to be a lot more to the text--historical curiosity value, for example -- to make it worth my while to bother with it. Life is too short.

Amazon.com: How long has translated fiction been part of your reading patterns?

M.A. Orthofer: I've always read in different languages (English and German, and then French, comfortably, a few others rather less comfortably), but even that has never been enough. There are so many books, so many worlds, so many cultures of interest that I find it necessary to rely heavily on translation. The Complete Review features lots of material on translated fiction.

Amazon.com: Is that its primary mission at this point, and how has the site evolved since you founded it?

M.A. Orthofer: I don't really see it as the primary mission, but I certainly made a conscious move to review more fiction in translation relatively early on, once it became clear to me how little coverage of it there was to be found elsewhere. (Of the first 1,000 titles reviewed at the Complete Review, 68 percent had been written in English; of the over 1,400 titles reviewed since then only 34 percent were written in English.) The traditional book review sources, especially newspapers (and most notably The New York Times Book Review under its current administration), seem to have increasingly moved away from covering fiction in translation, so there was and is a large void to be filled. The situation has improved somewhat in the past few years, especially with the many websites and blogs that take an interest in translated fiction, but there's still a lot of room for additional coverage.

The Complete Review hasn't evolved very much since I started it over a decade ago--right down to the very basic webpage design (in desperate need of an overhaul). Beyond the very occasional nod to popular fashion and what I think might be of interest to readers the vast majority of the books I review are the simply the ones I'm interested in and that I come across.

Amazon.com: What are some of the cliches or stereotypes about translated fiction, and how did your reading reinforce or negate those stereotypes?

M.A. Orthofer: I suspect there's a fear that translated fiction is art-house fare--like subtitled movies: more serious and demanding (and boring...). In some ways the fact that so much of what is available in translation is published by university and independent presses, who often do offer more serious and demanding fare, does reinforce that--but the BTB longlist is proof that there is a lot of playful and accessible fiction even beyond the generic Scandinavian thrillers that are being translated by the bucketload.

I like to consider translated fiction just fiction (that happens to have been translated); unfortunately it's often the most 'popular' fiction (i.e. the books that reach the largest audiences)--those Scandinavian (and Spanish and Italian) thrillers, among others--where it's most obvious that it has been translated (often hastily, far too often not very well--though the quality of the originals presumably often doesn't help, either). If my only exposure to translated fiction was that sort of stuff I'd be more suspicious of the translated-label too.

Amazon.com: Based on your reading over the past couple of years, are there any particular countries or regions that, in terms of translations, are “hot spots” for innovative and interesting literature?

M.A. Orthofer: There's interesting activity all over, though one of the difficulties with catching up with it in translation is that it often comes with such a time-delay, as American publishers take their time in bringing out translations (and many of the smaller foreign-fiction- focused presses also bring out older titles, rather than the most current works--indeed, eight of the twenty-five authors longlisted for the BTB are dead). I think that's especially pronounced with regards to "innovative" fiction: the big publishers tend to be scared of that anyway (preferring to translate safer bestselling mysteries and prize-winning novels), and the independents who do take it on often also only get to it years after the fact. In English translation I think a Latin American (and also Spanish) boom has definitely been building again, though--as usual--American publishers have hardly been keeping up. Consider that the Latin American works longlisted for the BTB include Juan Filloy's Op Oloop, originally published in Spanish in 1934, Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire (1986), César Aira's Ghosts (1990), and Roberto Bolaño's The Skating Rink (1993). Only two of the books were written in the past decade, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão's Anonymous Celebrity (2002) and José Manuel Prieto's Rex (2007). Aira is certainly among the most interesting contemporary writers, delivering something completely different with each book, but only a tiny part of his huge output is available in English.

Norway is a country from which an impressive range of talent has recently become available in English, led by Jan Kjærstad (shortlisted for the BTB with The Discoverer), Per Petterson, Dag Solstad, and Jon Fosse. Likewise, the past few years have seen quite a bit of notable Dutch-language literature appear in English, though much of that is work by an older guard--including deceased authors such as Flemish writer Hugo Claus, shortlisted for the BTB with Wonder, or Willem Frederik Hermans, whose works have finally become available in English in the past few years. But among the works shortlisted for the BTB was Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin, the first of his works to be translated.

A great deal is being translated from Arabic and Chinese, which is great to see, but the quality--both of the books and the translations--is very uneven for both languages, with very little (in my opinion) of standout quality. But they are certainly areas to keep an eye on.

There are some near-dead spots, too: it's very disappointing to see how little work of any interest is being translated from the Japanese, for example--whereby it's unclear to me whether that's just the fault of over-cautious American publishers, or whether contemporary Japanese literature has been reduced to little more than cellphone novels (which are "innovative", I suppose …) and poster-boy Haruki Murakami …..

Looking beyond what is currently available in the US, I think both Indian authors (writing in regional languages, as well as English) and European authors from the former Soviet sphere--from the Baltics through the Balkans-- will eventually make some impact in English. But it may take a while until we get to see their work.

Amazon.com: What publishers in the US and UK are doing the best job of getting great translated fiction to readers?

M.A. Orthofer: Getting it to readers is the hard part, I'm afraid. There are quite a large number who are bringing out an excellent selection, but they're almost all small and independent presses which lack the marketing clout that the larger houses have and are much less likely to get extensive review-coverage.

The list of publishers dedicated mainly or solely to translated works who bring out worthwhile books--i.e. where I am eager to get my hands on every translated title they bring out--is actually a pretty long one. I think it's no surprise that the ones who have established the strongest imprint-identity--where you know, at least to some extent, what to expect--have probably been the most successful. Among the ones that have been at this for a while Dalkey Archive Press, New Directions, and American University in Cairo Press are obvious standouts, along with smaller publishers like Dedalus and Green Integer. There are also quite a few relatively new publishers that have already established themselves quite well, including Europa Editions, Archipelago Books, and Open Letter.

But it's a tough market, and it's disappointing to see the problems some new publishers have had: Vertical's great series of popular contemporary Japanese fiction has been radically scaled back, and now Aflame, with its offering of contemporary fiction from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, is having difficulties.

Amazon.com: Does the internet make it easier for translated works to find an audience?

M.A. Orthofer: Absolutely. Given how little information is available in the print media -- save such wonderful resources such as World Literature Today -- the internet has, as in so many other regards, opened up new worlds. Sites such as Words Without Borders, which offers a wide variety of fiction (and non) in translation, as well as reviews and other information, discussion boards like the World Literature Forum, the many review sites that cover some (or a great deal of) fiction in translation, and the literary blogs that provide information about it all have helped to spread the word that there's a good deal of worthwhile translated fiction out there for the reading.

Amazon.com: What was the most surprising discovery for you personally during the judging process?

M.A. Orthofer: I probably shouldn't have been, but I have to admit I was surprised by how dependent we are on small and independent presses for fiction in translation. The only shortlisted title from anything approaching a "major" publisher was José Manuel Prieto's Rex, from Grove Press; add the fifteen longlisted titles that didn't make the cut and there's only one more, Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, from Knopf.

Actor Corey Haim,’80s heartthrob of “The Two Coreys” fame, died today at the age of 38 in Burbank.

Born Dec. 23, 1971, in Toronto, Haim began his acting career in 1984 with several bit parts; his first major role was in 1986’s Lucas as the adorably awkward title character.

But to a generation of adolescent girls, Coreymania took off in the 1987 horror-comedy The Lost Boys (long before vampires were pop-culture cool). Haim played new-kid-in-town Sam, who suspects a hipster pack of vampires, led by Kiefer Sutherland have gotten to his brother Mike (Jason Patric). The Lost Boys was also Haim’s first pairing with Corey Feldman, and the off-screen friends (and sometimes frenemies) went on to appear in several films together including teen comedies License to Drive (1988) and Dream a Little Dream (1989). The "Two Coreys" enjoyed heartthrob status on the teen scene as their faces graced the covers of Tiger Beat and 16. The Simpsons even spoofed Coreymania in an episode that finds a frantically addicted Lisa Simpson racking up a huge telephone bill calling the Corey hotline.

Haim’s popularity started to fizzle in the’90s and he appeared in a string of forgettable films. As his financial woes piled up, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1997. His struggle with substance abuse was well known in Hollywood as his longtime manager left him and he suffered a drug-induced stroke in 2001.

Feldman and Haim teamed up again in 2007 for A&E’s reality series, The Two Coreys, which put their friendship under a microscope. But fans turned away from this uncomfortable mess and the show was yanked after two seasons. Early buzz surrounding 2008’s The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe hinted at recapturing the ol’ Two Corey magic, but the troubled Haim only makes a cameo – and the movie barely made a blip at the box office.His last big-screen appearance was a brief one, in Crank 2: High Voltage.

-- Francine Ruley

At long last, the girls are busy again! By the girls, I mean my husband's flock of urban hens. As many of you know, the City of Seattle allows residents to keep chickens in the backyard. My husband has been doing this for many years now. And, whenever spring starts to sprout and the days get significantly longer, the hens start to lay their eggs again.

Earlier this week, my seven year old must have suspected that it was egg laying season again, because he decided to check the hen house afterschool. Indeed, James came trotting in with two fresh eggs and a big smile! My husband confirmed that the eggs weren't there the day before, so we knew we had the season's first round at hand.

During the spring, I often get a glut of eggs because the girls produce daily. Over the years, I've learned that egg salad is a great economical way to use up a surplus. Once the eggs are carefully hard boiled, peeled, and chilled, I cut them in half.

I then ready my Cuisinart food processor with the steel blade and add a few chunks of celery. I hit the pulse button once or twice to chop the celery. I then add the halved hard boiled eggs and hit the pulse button again about three times. I add a dollop or two of mayonnaise and some salt and pepper and then pulse everything once or twice. I'm always careful not to run the motor continuously because that would turn my chopped eggs into a smooth puree. My kids loves this egg salad as a snack on crackers or on a sandwich made with homemade bread. I sometimes add dill or freshly snipped chives. On other days, I defrost some of our cold smoked wild salmon and lay thin strips on top of the salad.

Aside from being quick and easy, my food processor egg salad is about as seasonal and  local as possible! If you would like information on how to keep chickens yourself, check out the Community Chickens section at Mother Earth News.

Photo by Melissa A. Trainer

--Melissa A. Trainer

My family adores beets and so do I. A beet salad can be not only chunky and down-home, but also paper-thin and elegant. I love the former, but have never made the latter. And the only thing standing between me and that elegant salad is a mandoline.

Lacking a professional chef's knife skills, I have had my eye on a mandoline for a long time, though I've probably only really needed it occasionally. But to turn potatoes into chips, cabbage into slaw or tomatoes into Caprese, it would be the bomb.

I've got a birthday on the horizon, and I'm making a list of the kitchen tools I've lived without for just too long. Is a mandoline one of them?

If you have one, how often do you use it? What do you use it for? And which one is the best to buy? My husband needs to know!

--Tracy Schneider

My battered old cast iron skillet did a fine job, but this version is deeper, deep enough to fry chicken without making a huge mess on my stove top. As much as I appreciated how golden, crispy my old pan turned many a bird, I always thought of it as a kind of one trick pony.

Then, I recently got the chance to pick chef Tom's noggin about his favorite uses for cast iron, casting this humble pan in a whole new light.

"It's great for searing steaks and seafood, for cooking hash browns," he said. "You can make wonderful cornbread in it. My wife, Jackie, gets the pan hot in the oven and pours in the batter. It sizzles and makes the best brown crust."

Taking poultry on a different flight path, Tom also likes to do a stove-top version of roast chicken, weighing a whole bird down with the top pan. Like the ultra-moist chicken cooked under a brick diners go cuckoo about in restaurants around the country.

I can wait to experiment with these dishes and continue my hunt for the best fried chicken. Got any cast iron favorites to share?

-- Leslie Kelly

You may know that Jamie Oliver has a show coming out on March 26 called Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution aimed at getting Americans to improve their diets, thereby improving their health. What you may not know is that Oliver was awarded the TED Prize (Technology, Entertainment,Design) for 2010. What is TED, you ask? It's non-profit organization that brings together the world's brightest thinkers and doers to exchange ideas, with the ultimate goal of making the world a better place. Learn more here.

Here are some things about Jamie Oliver that I didn't know. I have to say, even the jaded cynic in me is impressed (from the TED website):

• 12 television series, seen in 130 countries
• 10 cookbooks, translated into 29 languages, and sold almost 24 million copies in 56 countries
• His School Dinners/Feed Me Better campaign pressured the UK government to invest $1 billion to overhaul school lunches
• Founded the Fifteen Foundation, a social enterprise and chef apprenticeship for 18-24 year olds. Based in London, it has been replicated through franchising in Amsterdam, Cornwall and Melbourne

Suddenly, I am feeling a little inadequate.

Will you be tuning in to watch Jamie's show? Do you think this boisterous Brit has what it takes to cure America of its dietary woes?

Follow me on Twitter@pomodorista

For both professional reasons, wanting to keep up with the new nonfiction, and personal ones, wanting to figure out just what the hell happened, I've been reading a lot lately about the financial meltdown in 2008. Most of those accounts take place in board rooms and Senate chambers, and on cell phone calls between Sun Valley and the Caribbean: CEOs talking to CEOs, or to cabinet members or to committee chairs. Things happen at a lightning pace, entire white-collar armies are mustered into conference rooms to do overnight due diligence, and billions of dollars in debt are shifted between balance sheets.

It's all glamorous and horrifying and thoroughly unreal, which made turning next to Harry Markopolos's No One Would Listen--well, I wouldn't say refreshing, but it does make you feel like you've come back to earth. Markopolos, as you likely know, especially if you've been watching television (e.g. last night's Daily Show) the past few weeks, is the mid-level securities executive who blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme throughout the last decade like he was Joey Crawford reffing a Spurs game. While there are a few cameos by minor European royalty in his account, it's definitely a story of the the other side of Wall Street: not the celebrity CEOs and the big Manhattan investment banks, but the midsized firms out in the suburbs with interchangeable names like Rampart and Benchmark and people like Markopolos who work under pressure in the (still relatively well-paid) trenches to put together "investment products" with returns (or at least strategies) that will catch the eye of institutional and wealth-management investors. That's what first tipped Markopolos to Madoff: word got out about Madoff's freakishly consistent and robust yearly returns, and Markopolos's bosses pushed him to figure out what Madoff was doing so they could do it too. After about "five minutes" of looking into it, Markopolos was sure something was fishy, and he spent most of the next 10 years trying to find out more, and find someone in authority who would do something about it.

I remember when the Madoff story first came out, I read a bit of Markopolos's original expose memo to the SEC--famously titled, "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud"--and thought, "That guy should write a book." The memo is full of math, but it's as wonderfully direct and readable as you might expect from a title like that (and yes, you can't fathom how professional securities regulators could have possibly ignored its relentless logic and evidence). Now he has written a book--with the help of his team of fellow investigators and writer David Fisher--and it is indeed direct, and fascinating. Markopolos, as he'd be the first to tell you, is blunt and rough around the edges, and his book is too. It's not polished by any means, but it's clear, and you can feel the author's still-seething anger running just below the surface throughout. By the end of it, he's as angry at the SEC as he is at Madoff--who he once assumed would have him killed if he knew what Markopolos was doing--and when you see the case that he repeatedly laid out over the years, which showed that Madoff was crooked far beyond even the standards of what Markopolos paints as a congenitally--if not completely--shady industry, you'll be just as furious. --Tom

Check out these ideas:

--Lisa Kothari
Peppers and Pollywogs, Inc.
www.pepperspollywogs

Sometimes the simplest toys are the most popular...and, sometimes, they aren't really "toys" at all.  Case in point: magnets.  Magnets have been always been fun to play with but, this year, magnets seem to be making a comeback.  For example,  Buckyballs are small magnetic spheres which can be used to build various 3D shapes.  Simple, yet highly addictive...and very popular.  (We saw a few knockoffs of it at Toy Fair in New York this year.)

Another popular magnetic toy is Magna-Tiles.  Magna-Tiles are multi-colored plastic tiles with magnetic edges that allow kids to build all kinds of structures.  (It also comes in a both solid and translucent versions.)  They can also be used to help kids understand shapes, basic geometry and basic physics as well.

There are lots of other magnetic toys out there (including puzzles, games, and more) at a variety of price points.  But, the end result is the same -- magnetic toys will be "sticking around" for many years to come. -- E. Christian Moore

I hit the Cleveland Auto Show on Saturday, March 6. Like last year, there was a classic car show in a side gallery. The coolest thing there was this 1950 DeSoto.

Powered by a big flathead straight six, it's a lovely example of a the postwar superdreadnought four-door sedan. DeSotos of any sort are not terribly common, so this car was already in the running for the coolest thing in the room just by virtue of showing up. The owner was there with his wife, and they were displaying an old photo album and publicizing an Easter craft project they are involved with.

He bought it used in 1953 with 36,000 miles on it, and it's still going strong at age 60, with 158,000 showing on the odometer. What really makes it special, though, is its place in their life story:

It's a little early, but so what? Happy 55th wedding anniversary to Ron & Betty from all of us here at Car Lust, and may you and your DeSoto enjoy many more years and miles together.

--Cookie the Dog's Owner

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Susann Cokal on Angelology by Danielle Trussoni: "With 'Angelology' she revisits the subterranean burrows and the concern with paternity and inheritance, twisting them into an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre from 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Possession' to 'Angels and Demons' and 'The Historian.' 'Angelology' is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready ­visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain."
• Kakutani on The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee: "With 'The Surrendered,' Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career — a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence."
• Lydia Millet on The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: "What makes 'The Ask' work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind — a strategy upon which much farcical writing since 'Don Quixote' has depended — it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence. Milo and Don and Maura and their colleagues have more depth than many of the celebrated satirical characters of the past, and Lipsyte’s great accomplishment is to pull this trick off without trumpeting it. His characters are intelligent, even hyper­intelligent — they’re nobody’s fools, clearly — but finally their weakness is near-infinite."
• Laura Miller on The Infinities by John Banville: "If 'The Infinities' has the bones of a novel of ideas, it’s fleshed out and robed as a novel of sensibility and style. Its drapery is velvet and brocade — sumptuous and at times over-heavy. Banville is the sort of writer, drunk on Joyce, who wants to nail down every fleeting moment and sensation with some strenuously unprecedented combination of words: the 'slurred clamor' of a startled heartbeat, the 'humid conspiracy' of a grandmother, the 'lumpy wodge of stirabout' that is cereal left too long in its bowl of milk.... Fortunately, lavish demonstrations of literary virtuosity don’t bog down 'The Infinities,' as they often did with 'The Sea,' the novel that won Banville the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Things, mostly farcical, happen at a regular clip."
• Allison Glock on Tammy Wynette by Jimmy McDonough: "While Wynette the singer warrants extravagant praise — her unique interpretations fortifying every song, taking lyrics that would otherwise seem cheesy and transforming them into little odes of devastation — Wynette the person is a letdown. If you drained Dolly Parton of her swift wit and Loretta Lynn of her winning pluck, you’d get Tammy Wynette, a fairly plain, small-minded gal whose searing ambition and begrudging temperament kept her from any lasting contentment. As McDonough ... describes in striking detail, Wynette’s life may have been a heaping helping of trouble, but it was trouble, with few exceptions, she brought on herself."

Washington Post:

• Donna Rifkind on Lee's The Surrendered: "Serious readers these days are not so unsophisticated as to expect a novel like 'The Surrendered' to provide any sort of uplift -- which it certainly does not -- or to teach them Very Important Lessons about war and its catastrophic effects. They will read this book to share the life that's in it, and they have every right to expect that it will offer life in return. With one full-hearted portrait out of three, Lee has only partially but rather magnificently succeeded."
• Curt Suplee on The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris: "It is clear that modern science and modern democracy have evolved in striking parallel over the past 350 years. Can that epochal concurrence really have been a mere coincidence? Absolutely not, says Timothy Ferris in this important, timely and splendidly written book. In fact, he says, history shows exactly the opposite.... 'The Science of Liberty' is a profound delight whether one puts it down convinced or not. Either way, contemporary civilization won't look quite the same."
• Steven Levingston on Courage and Consequence by Karl Rove: "Rove addresses far more of his personal life than one would expect from a man who so effectively controlled information in the White House. That the drama is so touching and convincing leaves one to wonder if the master is again spinning with ease or, more fairly, if he isn't entitled like anyone else to a compassionate ear for his sorrows."
• Kristi Jemtegaard on Bunny Days by Tao Nyeu: "How much trouble can half-a-dozen bunnies get into in only seven short sentences? That's how long it takes to tell the tale of 'Muddy Bunnies,' the first of three effervescent escapades in this jolly romp, and the answer, apparently, is 'lots of trouble.' ... Tao Nyeu's fat fluid lines capture every emotional nuance from freshly washed joy to tail-clutching concern. Her backdrops resemble nothing so much as rumpled quilts, and her palette modulates with each episode. It all adds up to a dreamscape in which every chapter's final sentence seems not only believable but inevitable: 'Everyone is happy.'"

Los Angeles Times:

• Scott Esposito on The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe: "Oe's next novel, 'The Changeling,' has just come out in English, and it offers evidence that the Japanese master has regained his footing.... Chatty and casually indulging in cliché, the narration at times feels closer to the minimalism of Haruki Murakami than to Oe's once ostentatious prose. But 'The Changeling' is not a bland novel -- far from it. It is a richly imagined, complex story full of the oddity, irony and existential angst that have long been at the heart of Oe's writing, only here they are seen more often on the level of plot and structure than on that of sentence and image."
• Dinah Lenney on Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt: "Innocence and beauty restored then, with this gem of a memoir, deceptively simple in its proportions, but in truth: sad, funny, brave and luminous -- see how it catches the light.... Without self-pity or sanctimony, the author reminds us in this rare and generous book that there is no remedy for death. The way to live, he concludes, is 'to value the passing time'; the best we can do is to pay attention and to love each other well."
• Tim Rutten on Rove's Courage and Consequence: "Rove has produced -- that seems the right word -- a curious memoir, clear in its antipathies and in its constrained but obvious affection for the Bush dynasty, particularly George W. The why of those antagonisms and affections is more obscure. Can it really come down to the geographic accident of birth and a feisty little girl down the street? Perhaps -- or, maybe both are fruits of a largely unexamined life lived entirely within the hothouse of contemporary electoral politics."

Globe and Mail:

• Vivian Moreau on Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton: "The woods may be lovely, dark and deep, but in Matthew Hooton’s Deloume Road, the woods are also luminous, melancholy and vicious. Four pre-teen boys – two brothers, one friend and a misfit shunned by the first three – anchor the story set on forested southern Vancouver Island over a few days in what is supposed to be the early 1990s. But there is an otherworldliness to the story that could place it in any decade that includes boys riding bikes with skidding flourishes and adults with their own silencing troubles."

The Guardian:

• David Hare on The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley: "No dispassionate reader of Andrew Rawnsley's thumping 800 pages could doubt that we have lived through a strange and fascinating passage of British history which is still obscure. Our fate – through the lie-infested trauma of Iraq, the resultant general loss of faith in democratic politics and the clinching catastrophe in the money markets – has all the while been determined by a couple of the weirdest people ever to attain Downing Street.... This lively Shakespearian account is far too important to be remembered only for the stupid headlines it generated. When the smoke of mock-battle clears, we shall be left with the most thorough, the most enjoyable and the most original book yet written about New Labour."

The New Yorker:

• James Wood on David Shields's Reality Hunger: "His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling 'reality' over fiction, is highly problematic. A moment’s reflection might prompt the thought, for example, that Tolstoy (who so often reproduced reality directly from life) is the great 'reality-artist,' and a powerful argument against Shields’s anti-novelistic religious fury." And Lee's The Surrendered: "Shields may be imprecise and overwrought, but I found myself thinking of his useful skepticism while reading Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, 'The Surrendered'—a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional.... Many of these scenes are piercingly evoked, and the novel is so spacious in design and reach, so sensitive to historical catastrophe, that it seems churlish to bridle. Yet in the aggregate this slabbed magnificence seems, if not melodramatic, then certainly stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto, something made for the novel rather than made by it."

The Atlantic:

• Hitchens on Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: "On the origins of this once-world-shaking combat, with its still-vivid acerbity and cruelty, Hilary Mantel has written a historical novel of quite astonishing power.... The means by which Mantel grounds and anchors her action so convincingly in the time she describes, while drawing so easily upon the past and hinting so indirectly at the future, put her in the very first rank of historical novelists.... Wolf Hall is a magnificent service to the language and literature whose early emancipation it depicts and also, in its demystifying of one of history’s wickedest men, a service to the justice that Josephine Tey first demanded in The Daughter of Time."
• Benjamin Schwarz on a reissue of Moving Pictures by the late Budd Schulberg: "It’s a dryly elegiac chronicle of a privileged youth in the California sunshine, when the moguls’ kids attended the public high school, half of Hancock Park was empty lots, and Malibu was really a colony. It’s also a discerning and cold-eyed history of the emergence of the picture industry ... and the flowering of the studio system.... And, not least, it’s a collective portrait of horribly flawed but not unsympathetic people: the monstrous but heroically ambitious Louis B. Mayer; the broken, vulgar, and vulnerable Clara Bow, the It Girl (she was drawn to Budd, a shy and stammering boy, and his memories of that sad sex symbol achingly balance affection and pity); and above all, Budd’s parents.... Moving Pictures is a plangent and honest book, rendered all the more affecting by its modulation and detachment."

I admit that my husband makes a mean, meaty, beer-spiked chili, but he's also quite talented when it comes to piping frosting and whipping egg whites into soft peaks. I didn't think much about gender-specific cooking until hearing today that Allrecipes had created ManTestedRecipes.com, a "virtual man-cave" version of its parent site.

The idea is a place "where men can talk about food, post and comment on recipes, voice their opinion about cooking methods and find recipes for anything from a backyard barbeque or tailgate party to a satisfying family feast."

I would normally be more than slightly skeptical. I could see the site as a parody as easily as a real thing (Kung Pao Wild Pheasant?). Some of my favorite cooks are men, and they have no more interest than I do in backyard barbecues and tailgate parties. But I know the Allrecipes folks put solid research into their endeavors, and they're convinced this is (as Cosmo keeps trying to determine) What Men Really Want. They say their research shows 70 percent of men were more interested in visiting a male-focused cooking site than a general interest one. Other stats they quote: "When asked to describe the perfect dish, the top two adjectives among men are “spicy” and “meaty,” whereas women select “healthy” and “savory.” And, "Men enjoy preparing meals more than women (men 82 percent, women 75 percent)." (Huh? I have to wonder if they made it clear in that question whether they were talking about cooking as a household duty or a hobby.)

Initial recipes on the beta site include Irish Beef Stew with Guinness, "Tabascofied" Dover Sole, and Cheesy Barbecue Meatloaf. Food critic Jonathan Kauffman's take on it, on Twitter, was measured: "Does it have to be all about bacon, beef, and beer? Then again, if it gets men cooking..."

I'm not the target audience, and I suspect my husband isn't either, but I did see some "Man Tested" recipes that didn't strike me as particularly testosterone-heavy. Then I read through the introductions to those picks. One was a favorite that the guy got from his wife's family. Another was a recipe the poster's mom used to make. I only hope they'll still be eligible for the site's first competition, "The Dude Food Contest". 

-- Rebekah Denn