just because i'm pretty don't mean i'm deep

Dinner and Downton: the Adios, Guillermo edition

2012-01-31T01:26:00.003-05:00

mmmm. try this. we had it tonight with a liberal dose of Downton Abbey, season 2, episode 4. the crust was crispy and flavorful, the simple toppings were surprisingly well matched, and o'brien is becoming a total softy.

Jim Lahey's No-Knead Pizza Dough

Ingredients

3 1/4 c [500 g] bread flour

2 1/2 t [10 g] instant or other active dry yeast

3/4 t [5 g] table salt

3/4 t plus a pinch [about 3 g] sugar

1 1/3 c [300 g] room-temperature (about 72 degrees F) water

extra-virgin olive oil for pans

Preparation

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the water and, using a wooden spoon or your hand, mix until blended, at least 30 seconds. The dough is a bit stiffer than most of the others in this book,* not as wet and sticky. Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature until the dough has more than doubled in volume, about 2 hours.
Using a bowl scraper or rubber spatula, remove the dough from the bowl onto a floured work surface. Gently form into a rough ball. Then divide the dough into two halves, spacing them 4 inches apart, and cover both with a moistened kitchen towel for 30 minutes.
When you are ready to make your pie, oil two 13-by-18-inch rimmed baking sheets. Pick up the dough and invert and stretch the dough the length of the baking sheet. The floured side should now be facing up and the moist side should now be on the pan. Using your palms, gently pull, press, and stretch the dough to fill the entire bottom of the pan. There is no need to make a crust or a lip around the edge of the pan. Your objective should be to make an even layer of dough across the entire bottom of the pan. If the dough sticks to your fingers, lightly dust it with flour or coat your hands with oil. Pinch any holes together. Repeat with the second piece. The dough is ready to top as you like (see the following recipes).

* Jim Lahey, My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

Toppings

Pizza Funghi

1 1/4 lb [550 g] cremini mushrooms, trimmed

1 1/3 c [133 g] diced yellow onion

2 t [1 g] fresh thyme leaves

1/2 recipes [400 g] basic pizza dough (above)

1 t [6 g] table salt

2 1/2 T [40 g] extra-virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F, with a rack in the center.
Use a mandoline to cut the mushrooms into thin slices (1/8-inch thick). In a medium bowl or on the pan, toss together the mushrooms, onion, and thyme.
Scatter or spread the mushroom mixture fairly evenly over the dough, going all the way to the edges; put a bit more of the topping around the edges of the pie, as the outside tends to cook and brown more quickly. Sprinkle with the salt and drizzle with the olive oil.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the mushrooms are starting to turn golden brown and the crust is pulling away from the sides of the pan. Serve the pizza hot or at room temperature.

Pizza Cavolfiore

1 medium [700 g] cauliflower, outermost green leaves removed

just under 1/2 c [60 g] finely chopped pitted Sicilian colossal or other large green olies

about 1/2 c [60 g] freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano cheese

2 large cloves [15 g] garlic, finely grated or very finely minced

3/4 t [4 g] table salt

1/2 t or to taste [1 g] crushed red pepper flakes

1/4 c [60 g] extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 recipe [400 g] basic pizza dough (above)

1 to 2 T [10 to 15 g] homemade bread crumbs

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F, with a rack in the center.
Cut the cauliflower into quarters. Using a mandoline, shave it into very thin slices (about 1/16-inch thick). In a medium bowl, toss together the cauliflower, olives, Parmesan, garlic, salt, red pepper flakes, and olive oil.
Spread the cauliflower mixture over the dough, going all the way to the edges; put a bit more of the topping around the edges of the pie as the outside tends to cook and brown more quickly. Sprinkle evenly with the bread crumbs.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the topping is starting to turn golden brown and the crust is pulling away from the sides of the pan. Serve the pizza hot or at room temperature.

Pureed lovely

2012-01-29T00:44:00.002-05:00

so, this worked for us tonight. and little guilt. naturally, we paired it with some super-fatty-awesome grilled-cheese sandwiches to balance out the, you know, HEALTH. good combination, actually.

enjoy, doods!

Creamy Broccoli–White Bean Soup

from http://www.wholeliving.com/130293/creamy-broccoli-white-bean-soup

Ingredients:

1 head broccoli (1 pound), cut into florets, stems thinly sliced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 yellow onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
One 15-ounce can cannellini beans, drained
2 1/2 cups chicken stock
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon pine nuts, toasted
1/2 ounce shaved Parmesan, for serving

Preparation:

Steam broccoli florets and stems until tenderand bright green, about 3 minutes. Let cool slightly.Reserve 1/2 cup florets for garnish.
Heat oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Saute onion and garlic until translucent, about 6 minutes.Add beans and stock and bring mixture to a simmer.Remove from heat and add broccoli; puree in batches in a blender until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish each bowl with broccoli florets, toasted pine nuts, and shaved Parmesan.

Winter wonderfrau

2012-01-25T19:25:00.003-05:00

I am married to Lady Sybil Crawley

2012-01-25T19:22:00.002-05:00

[G is] Lady Sybil Crawley. The youngest daughter of Lord Grantham, [he's] compassionate, strong, and really concerned about social justice. [He]’d also like to be able to vote. The bravest and most idealistic member of [his] family, [he's] the most likely to end up at a political rally, try and help a servant to a better job, or scandalize [his] sisters by wearing pants to a party.

of note, G, please always wear pants to the party. thanks.

This is probably not true

2012-01-24T18:34:00.003-05:00

http://www.weta.org/tv/picks/downtonabbey/quiz

Viszyul poemtry

2012-01-24T16:50:00.000-05:00

amazing art work not by me

Sweet reminiscence

2012-01-23T16:08:00.001-05:00

1 large clove garlic
1 piece (1/3 inch long) peeled fresh ginger
1/2 small bulb fennel, cored and cut into large chunks, or 1 small rib celery, cut into large chunks
1 small carrot, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 small parsnip, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 large shallot, cut in half
3 Tbs. unsalted butter
2 tsp. curry powder
1 cup brown lentils, picked over and rinsed
1 qt. homemade or lowsalt canned chicken or vegetable broth
1/4 tsp. kosher salt; more as needed
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper; more as needed

Preparation

Pulse the garlic and ginger in a food processor until chopped. Add the fennel or celery, carrot, parsnip, and shallot and pulse until coarsely chopped.
Melt 2 Tbs. of the butter in a 4-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the chopped vegetables and cook, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the curry powder and cook, stirring, until the curry powder is fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the lentils, broth, salt, and pepper. Bring the soup to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to maintain a brisk simmer, cover, and cook until the lentils are tender, 25 to 30 minutes.
Transfer 1-1/2 cups of the soup to a blender or a food processor and purée until smooth. Stir the purée back into the soup along with the remaining 1 Tbs. butter. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and adjust the consistency with water, if you like.

SERVING SUGGESTION: Garnish with a dollop of plain whole-milk yogurt and chopped fresh mint or cilantro, or both.

Keep on pushing

2012-01-13T04:56:00.000-05:00

Partners in Love and the Presidency

by Connie Schultz

from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/books/the-obamas-by-jodi-kantor-review.html

On the evening of Jan. 12 last year, Michelle Obama sat in the front row of a packed memorial service and fixed her eyes on her husband as he took the stage.

The Obamas were at the University of Arizona in Tucson to honor the six people who were killed in shootings that had left Representative Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life. Jodi Kantor describes Mrs. Obama’s reaction as the president spoke:

“She was following every word, nodding a little, her eyes flickering with his words.” When President Obama described Ms. Giffords opening her eyes for the first time, “Michelle closed her own eyes briefly, pantomiming her husband’s speech a little, showing the relief her husband was expressing. She did that sometimes, acting out the words he was saying during his speeches, as if she could give them some of her animation and help propel his message across.”

By the end of the speech, Ms. Kantor writes: “The expression on Michelle’s face was one of deep satisfaction. He had given the kind of speech she knew he could give. The look on her face said: this is the president I wanted you to be.”

Cue the groans. What kind of journalist presumes to know Michelle Obama’s mind?

In lesser hands “The Obamas” would be an act of astonishing overreach, but Ms. Kantor, who covered the Obamas for The New York Times during the 2008 presidential campaign, and is currently a Washington correspondent for the paper, has earned the voice of authority. A meticulous reporter, Ms. Kantor is attuned to the nuance of small gestures, the import of unspoken truths. She knows that every strong marriage, including the one now in the White House, has its complexities and its disappointments. Ms. Kantor also — and this is a key — has a high regard for women, which is why hers is the first book about the Obama presidency to give Michelle Obama her due. In the process we learn a great deal about the talented and introverted loner who married her, and how his wife has influenced him as a president.

“The Obamas” is full of gossipy tidbits that fuel a narrative about their marriage and how it has shaped the presidency. Public glimpses of their intimacy portray a genuine bond forged by an ambitious man and his equally driven wife. He can be arrogant and self-absorbed, but he strives for her approval. She is his champion and critic, and a fierce guardian of their mutual mission.

Ms. Kantor retires wooden stereotypes of the political wife as a prop or a problem and instead explores what it means to be a modern first lady, one with her own opinions and an expectation that she will be heard. The book offers concrete examples of how Mrs. Obama, even as she wrestled with self-doubt, bolstered her husband as only a wife can and kept him grounded in ways that had nothing to do with the tired story of her ordering him to pick up his dirty socks.

She helped him recalibrate when his public approval rating tanked, urging him to alter wonky speeches with personal stories that could close the distance between cool-headed him and a suffering public. She also was the driving force behind an eventual staff shake-up that led to the departure of senior advisers after Scott Brown won Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. Mr. Brown’s victory cost the Democrats their supermajority, and Mrs. Obama was furious with the president, and his staff, whom she saw as insular and disorganized, and failing to prepare for the worst possible outcomes.

“She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama told aides. Eventually he agreed.

“This was Michelle’s most profound influence on the Obama presidency,” Ms. Kantor writes, “the sense of purpose she shared with her husband, the force of her worldview, her passionate beliefs about access, opportunity, and fairness; her readiness to do what was unpopular and pay political costs. Every day, he met with advisers who emphasized the practical realities of Washington, who reminded him of poll numbers; he spent his nights with Michelle, who talked about moral imperatives, aides said, who reminded him again and again that they were there to do good, to avoid being distracted by political noise, to be bold.”

Sometimes they were too much alike. They shared a disdain for Congress, which crippled Mr. Obama’s ability to broker deals. They clung to old friendships, which further isolated them in a town they already distrusted. They also shared a relentless belief that the president was misunderstood and underappreciated by the people he serves. As the wife of a United States senator, I know this to be a common and all-too-toxic affliction in political families. No good comes of it.

In the immediate days after the 2008 election neither the press nor the president-elect’s staff knew that Mrs. Obama was so apprehensive about moving to Washington that she considered staying behind in Chicago until her daughters finished the school year. When Mr. Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, Mrs. Obama refused to move her family to the capital to join him. She had little faith in politics as a way to improve lives, and she wanted to insulate her young children from the surreal world of Washington.

I first learned of this in 2006, when Senator Obama was in Ohio campaigning in the Senate race of my husband, Sherrod Brown. When Mr. Obama heard that I too had refused to move to Washington, he sought me out backstage. “You’ve got to meet my wife,” he said, smiling. “She feels about Washington the way you do.” In 2008 I met Mrs. Obama twice and interviewed her once by phone. I have not spoken to her since the 2008 election.

In 2007, after initial reluctance, she gave Mr. Obama her blessing to run for president. The ensuing campaign reinforced her misgivings about political life. She felt stung by negative coverage of her and ill-served at times by an unsupportive staff. She changed her mind about staying in Chicago after Mr. Obama made it clear he needed her, and the girls. Thus began the public transformation of Michelle Obama.

Mrs. Obama struggled with her changed role — in the world at large but also in her family. It was impossible to take her girls to school, or sometimes even attend their soccer matches, without embarrassing them with the accompanying ruckus. She also felt new limitations in her marriage — imposed, not by the president, but by his presidency. An accomplished professional, smart and wickedly funny, she was used to being Mr. Obama’s partner. Now his day was scheduled in five-minute increments, and she was abruptly recast as his helpmate.

She resisted the ceremonial duties expected of first ladies. She loathed the stuffy annual lunches with Congressional spouses, agreeing to attend one only if they joined her the day before to volunteer at a Washington-area food bank. Her good intentions were derailed by media coverage that focused on the $515 sneakers she wore to load groceries.

Clothing had become her “compensatory pleasure” for dutifully enduring the public demands of her husband’s political career, Ms. Kantor writes. “If I have to go, I’m getting a new dress out of it,” she told neighbors.

Now perhaps the most prominent black woman in America, she felt pressure to counter negative stereotypes by telegraphing images of elegance and self-confidence. Instead, she became America’s first fashionista during tough economic times for the country.

Her new image set off repeated bouts of apoplexy among some White House staff members, who weighed in on her choices, albeit indirectly, creating a climate of tension. Ms. Kantor describes a blowup in August 2010 between the White House press secretary at the time, Robert Gibbs, and the Obamas’ close friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett, in which he screamed an expletive at her. In a condescending tone Ms. Jarrett said, “The first lady would not believe you’re speaking this way.” His response was to curse the first lady too.

Over time the Obamas grew into their new jobs. In the process, Ms. Kantor writes, they have traded roles: “She had entered with her expectations low and then exceeded them; he had entered on top of the world, and had been descending to earth ever since.”

Perhaps they have reached an agreement that, for now, Washington is their town too.

Hot off the press

2012-01-13T04:42:00.000-05:00

The State of the Union: a new book on the First Marriage

by David Remnick

from http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/01/16/120116crbo_books_remnick

“In public, they smiled and waved,” Jodi Kantor writes, “but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House?”

In “The West Wing,” employment at the White House was an invitation to a fizzy world of noble intent and screwball comedy. The spawn of William Powell and Myrna Loy aced their F.B.I. security clearances, did the world-altering work of civil seraphim, and strode endless hallways, cracking wise in pools of amber light. As it happens, to work at the White House is to wake each morning in darkness and in dread. It is not only the crises of global moment that shred the nerves. The constant tide of trivia cascading down the BlackBerry screen each morning, through Twitter and Politico, makes an aide’s first sip of coffee taste of acid reflux.

On September 16, 2010, Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s longtime press secretary, was greeted at first light with news that a book being published in France had Michelle Obama telling Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that she “can’t stand” life in the White House, that it was “hell.” Gibbs, a cantankerous Alabaman, went about strong-arming the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. The cost of failure would have been high. Like so much of the senior staff, Gibbs had, at best, a wary relationship with the First Lady. Most Americans admired Michelle Obama and were moved by her forthright intelligence and her determination to raise two normal daughters in the phantasmagorical aquarium of the White House, but the staff feared her. White House staffers always fear the First Lady. They fear, above all, her nighttime access, the pillow talk that can undo their careful planning. (Nancy Reagan was capable of persuading her Ronnie to fire a chief of staff or a Cabinet secretary with nary a glance across the TV trays.) Gibbs was immensely relieved, therefore, when he got the French to issue a denial by 11 A.M. Crisis averted.

And yet, as Jodi Kantor writes in her energetically reported “The Obamas” (Little, Brown), Valerie Jarrett came into the next day’s 7:30 A.M. staff meeting declaring darkly that the First Lady was in fact “dissatisfied” with the handling of Hellgate. Gibbs was baffled and enraged.

“Fuck this, that’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” he shouted. Months of anxiety about Michelle Obama and resentment of Jarrett’s curious role as senior adviser and First Friend came to a boil. “What is it she has concerns about? What did she say to you?”

Jarrett answered vaguely.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Gibbs said. “Did you ask her?”

Jarrett said something about the denial not being fast enough.

“Why is she talking to you about it? If she has a problem she should talk to me!”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Jarrett said.

“It was Jarrett’s tone, calm to the point of condescension, that finally undid Gibbs,” Kantor writes. He seemed so “frustrated one colleague thought he was going to cry.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said.

“The first lady would not believe you’re speaking this way,” Jarrett said, still composed.

“Then fuck her, too!” Gibbs said.

In the end, it appeared that Jarrett was using the ominous threat of the First Lady’s displeasure to cover her own ineffectuality in the affair. From then on, Gibbs and Jarrett barely spoke.

Kantor nails her story—she had six sources in the room—and casts it all in the stock lexicon of D.C. confrontations: Gibbs “shook with rage” and soon “stormed out.” The rest of the group “sat stunned.” The conflict, the profanity, the yelling: it’s the sort of vivid, if ultimately meaningless, detail that provides books like “Renegade,” “Game Change,” and, now, “The Obamas” with their lurid and irresistible zing. Such books regard more earnest matters like history, context, and ideas the way a child looks at a plate of Brussels sprouts. They aim to serve up big bowls of ice cream. And, no matter what Michelle Obama counsels, we political gluttons will lick the spoon clean.

In September, 2009, Kantor interviewed the Obamas in the Oval Office for the Times Magazine. During the 2008 campaign, she had written a series of revealing stories for the paper on Obama’s past. Now she asked the Obamas how it was possible to have an equal marriage when one partner was President. “The first lady let out a sharp ‘hmmmpfh,’ as if she were relieved someone had finally asked, then let her husband suffer through the answer,” Kantor recalls. “It took him three stop-and-start tries.” Kantor noted the “subtle tension I had felt in that room.” The couple had spent much of their marriage debating “how much change was possible within the political system and whether public life could be made livable.”

A book about the Obamas’ marriage, though, starts out with a problem. As the author of “Anna Karenina” could have attested, an unhappy marriage can be unhappy—and interesting—in countless ways. By contrast, when Ian McEwan tried to portray a happy marriage in his novel “Saturday”—“What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife”—not a few critics found it unbelievable or smug. “Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan’s fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex,” John Banville groused. Michelle Obama, in fact, has described her husband as “snorey and stinky” of a morning. More seriously, both Obamas concede that their marriage has known its tensions and discord, particularly a decade ago, when Barack was working as an obscure state legislator in Springfield, Illinois, while Michelle tried to juggle career, children, and household back in Hyde Park. She was not pleased and made sure he knew it, loading him up with shopping lists and resentment. The Obamas still have differences: he believes in political process; she is wary of politics; he is purpose-driven, ambitious; she wants everyone home for dinner at six-thirty, no excuses; she loses her patience; he apologizes. Yet the union, as far as we know, is solid and loving; it works. Their differences seem largely complementary. As the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa said of his beloved Adrian Pennino, “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.”

The outside narrative of the Obamas’ marriage takes Michelle to be the repository of domestic wisdom, decency, and integrity. She sets the limits and hoists, when needed, an ego-deflating eyebrow. Barack may possess outsized ambition and talent, but he leaves his socks and shirts all over the place and needs to be reminded that he is not, at least at home, the Prince of Peace. One suspects that the reality is more complicated, as in any marriage. (Who would have guessed that the lip-locked Gores, and not the tempestuous Clintons, would now be rent asunder?) Still, the task remains of making a happy marriage interesting—and of doing so without the imaginative equipment and freedoms of fiction. Kantor must content herself with what details she can glean from friends and associates, many of whom, we can readily tell, are sanctioned by the Office of Communications to fill the reporter’s cup with soothing Ovaltine. Kantor is wise to this, of course, but it doesn’t make her work any easier.

You sense the strain when, in the opening pages of “The Obamas,” Kantor sets out the terms of her project: “In public, they smiled and waved, but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House, and how was it affecting the rest of us?” Later, she works even harder to gin up the melodrama: “Could Barack Obama’s attempts to make his wife happy—to compensate for his decision to pursue politics, to run for president—hurt his work as president? What if his attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable—Michelle and politics, but also many other issues—were impossible; what if the attempts themselves came with their own costs?” The questions are at once labored and absurd. The state of a marriage is a poor guide to the course of a Presidency. The book is on surer ground when it sets aside all that and simply calls the Obamas on their occasional sanctimonies. When Michelle Obama tells a reporter that her husband is not really a politician but, rather, “a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change,” Kantor remarks that sometimes the Obamas are “like tailors who call themselves ‘garment reconstruction engineers,’ unwilling to fully acknowledge the business they were really in.”

The portrait that Kantor paints of the Obamas at home is an elaboration of her Times Magazine article and doesn’t much alter our previous impressions. The Obamas draw a pretty tight curtain around themselves. They eat dinner together in the residence at least five days a week. Michelle goes to bed at nine-thirty or ten, while the President does paperwork in the Treaty Room. They have a very small circle of friends. They do not go out of their way to seek out new people. (“The decision came with a price,” Kantor maintains, “reinforcing the already severe isolation of the presidency.”) The Obamas are “virtual prisoners” in the White House, something that rankles them both. The President tries to pierce the bubble by reading ten letters a day from ordinary people. Michelle shops online using a credit card registered to another name. When the Obamas wanted a swing set for their daughters, Sasha and Malia, the chief usher, Rear Admiral Stephen Rochon, visited the factory in South Dakota to inspect it. At Malia’s school, the fifth-grade band played once for the parents and siblings and once for Barack, Michelle, and Sasha. Michelle is the kind of helicopter parent that you might be if your helicopter was Marine One: she demands that Sasha and Malia finish their homework a day in advance when possible, and asks for written reports on their travels. She even persuaded the girls’ piano teacher in Chicago to relocate to Washington. When it comes to politics, Michelle presses the staff for clearly defined projects, no “one-offs,” but, in the end, won’t spend more than a couple of days a week on these projects. (Rahm Emanuel found her reluctance “maddening.”)

While Kantor seems, on the whole, quite admiring of the Obamas, she also cites their moments of self-pity—Obama has said that he can hardly wait to begin his life as an ex-President—which sit awkwardly with their tremendous good fortune. The Obamas (particularly Michelle) grew up in modest circumstances, but they come out of a collection of privileged institutions: Punahou School, Occidental, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard Law School; their daughters are healthy and bright, students at the Chicago Lab Schools and, now, Sidwell Friends. All the talk of lost privacy, the difficulty of living in the White House, the yearning for the normalcy of Hyde Park—we read it in “The Obamas” and have read it many times before—is understandable but also a little unseemly. The Presidency is not a career. Nor is it a component piece in a greater picture of familial contentment. It is an unimaginably demanding mission that inevitably exacts a toll. To carry it out, a President is going to miss some dinners, acquire wrinkles, gray hair, and worse. But we don’t want to hear complaints. We prefer our warriors happy.

The frustrations are, of course, hardly limited to life in the White House. Obama is President at a moment in history when the forces arrayed against him are preposterously difficult and malign; the conservative opposition is more radical than anything confronted by his predecessors. The public is angry and the crises—economic, diplomatic, environmental, social, and political—are myriad. For all that, staff members like Emanuel hated hearing the President railing against the “silliness” of Washington. “The rules apply to everybody,” as one former adviser told Kantor, and complaining about how Washington works “is like crying over the rain.” Obama was elected to lead “a rational, postracial, moderate country that is looking for sensible progress,” a White House official tells Kantor. “Except, oops, it’s an enraged, moralistic, harsh, desperate country. It’s a disconnect he can’t bridge.”

Have his intimates helped him try? Obama’s trusted circle is tiny, and this is why a discussion of Michelle’s role has more than gossip value. One encouraging theme that Kantor teases out in detail is Michelle’s insistence that her husband stay true to their common principles of inclusion and doing good for the most people. “While I get plenty of good advice from a lot of people during the course of the day,” Obama has said, “at the end of each day, it is Michelle—her moral voice, her moral center—that cuts through all the noise in Washington and reminds me of why I’m there in the first place.”

“The Obamas” makes a few glancing references to previous First Ladies and Presidential marriages, but a richer sense of history would have served it well. In “Hidden Power” (2001), a shrewd and entertaining survey of twentieth-century White House marriages, Kati Marton writes that the second-floor bedrooms and sitting rooms of the residence have known constant intrigue, intimacy, rage, and froideur. Take the marital history of the Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ellen Louise Axson, died a year into his first term. At a White House tea six months later, Wilson met a woman named Edith Bolling Galt, a plump and prosperous widow whose primary interests were travel and fashion. Teddy Roosevelt once said that Wilson had all the passion of an “apothecary clerk,” but reading Wilson’s letters to Galt you would take him for Lord Byron. Each day, he sent to her house, on Dupont Circle, a packet of billets-doux and state documents. After Wilson married Galt, in December of 1915, she began to sit in on high-level meetings. Four years later, Wilson suffered a “cerebral incident”—thus beginning Edith’s term as “the first female President of the United States.” At the time, Wilson was in a struggle with Congress to pass his design for a League of Nations—an initiative blocked by his nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge. (“We shall make reservation after reservation, amend and amend, until there is nothing left.”) After a second stroke left Wilson paralyzed on his left side, unable to read or stand, Edith turned the White House into a kind of isolation ward. In the end, the Senate rejected the League, and Wilson was unable to run for a third term. He tried to write a book, but the only page he completed was the dedication: to his wife, Edith Galt Wilson.

What other White House marriages eclipse the Obamas’ for drama and misery? Nearly all of them, Marton’s book makes clear. After 1918, when Eleanor Roosevelt discovered F.D.R.’s affair with Lucy Mercer, their union, in the words of their son James, became “an armed truce.” For Eleanor, election to the White House “meant the end of any personal life of my own”—a note of self-pity that F.D.R. mocked with an irritated quatrain:

Did my Eleanor relate
All the sad and awful fate
Of the miserable lives
Lived by Washington wives?

Rather than bow to a life of disappointment, Eleanor emerged as an independent figure, and no less an iconic liberal than her husband. Encouraged by the Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, her loving confidante, she began to write a daily newspaper column, hold frequent press conferences, and speak out, at home and in public, for the poor, for the oppressed, and for the unlucky. She sent her husband so many imploring notes that F.D.R. imposed on her a three-memo-a-day limit.

First Ladies, like Presidents, have a way of reacting to their predecessor. Bess Truman’s reaction to Eleanor’s liberal Lady Bountiful was a kind of down-home reticence. (“A woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband and be silent and be sure her hat is on straight.”) Jacqueline Kennedy’s reaction to Mamie Eisenhower’s coupon-clipping homeyness was an insistence on cultural glamour. Both Kennedys, Marton writes, were “consummate performers”—thrilled by pomp and power and uninterested in inner life. “We’re a couple of icebergs, with most of who we are submerged beneath the surface,” Jacqueline said. There was a furtive cruelty to the marriage—one impossible to imagine in our era of hyperexposure. J.F.K. prevailed upon Jacqueline to hire as her press secretary one of his mistresses, Pam Turnure. At the White House, Jacqueline burnished her husband’s image, though she sometimes struggled with the strictures of government service. When she was told by the office of protocol that she had been given horses by both the King of Saudi Arabia and the President of Ireland but that, owing to their value, they had to be returned, she replied, “There’s a problem. I want the horses.”

Pat Nixon was surely one of the loneliest inhabitants of the White House. Richard Nixon was so flagrantly indifferent to his wife that one of his aides, Roger Ailes, wrote in a memorandum, “I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd. At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her.” In Nashville, on her birthday, Nixon took the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and played “Happy Birthday” on the piano. The song complete, Pat ran to him with her arms outstretched in pleasure. Nixon spurned her embrace and signalled the master of ceremonies to resume the program.

Where Pat was the silent sufferer, Betty Ford was a plainspoken Midwestern emissary to the world of feminism and youth culture; she gaily admitted that she liked to sleep with her husband “as often as possible,” supported Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment, and allowed that she would not be surprised if her teen-age daughter had had sex or smoked marijuana. A couple of years after her husband left office, she was treated for a longtime dependency on alcohol and painkillers, and though her openness about her problem helped destigmatize addictions, it cast a sadder light on her years in the White House.

The most politically powerful of the modern First Ladies were Nancy Reagan, who controlled personnel and scheduling with the help of an astrologer, and Hillary Clinton, who, in the first year of the Clinton Administration, was given charge of the most comprehensive piece of proposed legislation in decades. Both suffered from their presumption, and both, in second terms, learned to recede and assume more discreet modes of influence. Laura Bush, coming in the choppy wake of Hillary Clinton, sought to avoid the relay circuits of power, and played the role of quiet booster. On her first trip to Kennebunkport, she was asked by her blue-blooded mother-in-law-to-be what she did. Laura replied, “I read, I smoke, and I admire.” She retained that back-seat discretion throughout the two terms of the Bush Presidency.

First Ladies are always careful to praise the glories of their office—the chance to make a mark on literacy, poverty, health, or, in Lady Bird Johnson’s case, “beautification”—and yet the sense of exposure can be unbearable. A life of intense publicity is typically one that the Presidential spouse assented to but did not seek out. For all her wariness about politics, though, Michelle Obama has clearly reconciled herself to her new role. As First Lady, she has her campaign against childhood obesity, and seems to play a pleasant admonitory role in a solid marriage. Like Abigail Adams, a proto-feminist, who urged her husband to “remember the ladies,” she has her principles and is quick to remind her husband of them.

In some respects, the Obamas resemble a post-sixties version of the Clintons. They are graduates of some of the richest institutions in the country. In Hyde Park, they lived among other highly educated, liberal, earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding people, with all the requisite concerns about “family-career balance,” “doing good and doing well.” They lived with the small hypocrisies and pleasures of their milieu, bringing together some hyper-wealthy friends and unabashedly progressive causes. It is a liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.

What makes the Obamas a departure, in historical terms, is race. In an excellent study, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency,” Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School (where he knew the Obamas as students), notes that in many black communities the celebrations surrounding the Obama election victory and the Inauguration were on a par with Joe Louis’s one-round knockout of Max Schmeling, in 1938, or, indeed, with the celebrations surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863. Among African-Americans, Obama was “adored for identifying as black when he could have labeled himself something other,” Kennedy writes, and “for being a paragon of dignity and intellectuality in a culture suffused with derogatory images of brutish black masculinity.” But Obama was also, signally, adored “for marrying a black woman, unlike many high-achieving African Americans who marry outside the race”—and, what’s more, a black woman who went to Harvard but returned home to the South Side. This circumstance was essential in capturing the black vote from Hillary Clinton, who had started out with tremendous support among African-Americans. Michelle Obama, in spite of her longtime reluctance, became a crucial asset in the campaign, and she has, despite lingering mistrust among many white conservatives, retained a remarkably high popularity.

For the Obamas, being the first African-Americans to reside in the White House has surely involved singular pressures. The greatest is security—we already know that there has been a larger number of death threats against the President than against his predecessors. But racial politics also play out in small, less ominous ways. When Vogue asked Michelle Obama to sit for a cover story, there was, Kantor reports, division in the ranks of the staff. Two white aides objected, saying that having the First Lady appear in Vogue, inevitably dressed in expensive designer clothing, would look unfeeling when so many people were living in misery. Two black advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Desiree Rogers, argued that, on the contrary, having an educated, attractive African-American First Lady on the cover of Vogue could be a source of inspiration, and counteract a plenitude of negative images. In the end, Obama posed for the magazine wearing clothes from both a young American designer she helped discover, Jason Wu, and J. Crew.

The cultural politics of race in America are always refracted through class. Kantor points out that when Michelle was an undergraduate at Princeton one of her aunts worked in town as a cleaning woman—a circumstance that she did not widely share with her classmates from Andover, Exeter, and Harvard-Westlake. Marian Robinson, Michelle’s mother, is the most endearing figure in the book; her lack of pretension has survived her relocation from a bungalow on the South Side to a third-floor bedroom in the White House residence. At the White House, the First Mother-in-Law insists on doing her own laundry, and, when she slips into D.C. on her own and someone stops her on the street to say she looks like the First Lady’s mother, she just smiles and says, “I get that a lot.”

The Obamas spend much of their social time with two African-American couples very much like themselves: Eric and Cheryl Whitaker and Martin Nesbitt and Anita Blanchard. Both Whitakers and Blanchard are physicians; Nesbitt is an entrepreneur, who made a fortune in the parking-lot business. They are all from the Hyde Park-Kenwood area on the South Side, and send their kids to the Lab School. They mix easily in the white world (Nesbitt’s principal investor was the Pritzker family) and give their time and money to community projects. Their friends also include John Rogers, a financier who played basketball with Michelle’s brother, Craig, at Princeton, and, of course, Valerie Jarrett—a kind of big-sister-confessor figure. They are all, by now, well practiced in talking to reporters about the Obamas. They praise the First Couple, and spice the interview with the occasional joke or semi-indiscretion to make the rosy picture credible. They talk about how African-Americans of their class and generation feel the weight of race most acutely in relation to affirmative action, sensing that whites often think they have not truly earned their place at Harvard or Princeton or on the medical faculty. But they soft-pedal such discomforts. Obama, too, has learned to speak in clichés and orotund deflection about what it’s like to be a black President, governing from a house built largely by slaves. As one of his close friends tells Kantor, “The first black president doesn’t want to give any insight into being the first black president.”

When the Obamas finally leave the White House, they will undoubtedly write memoirs, which might add to what we know of their relationship on Pennsylvania Avenue. It would be too much to expect indiscretion, though. Harry Truman, late in life, caught his wife, Bess, burning their letters to each other. “What are you doing?” Truman implored. “Think of history.”

“Oh, I have,” she said, and went on adding to the pyre. ♦

Raspberry seed in my molar

2012-01-12T05:00:00.003-05:00

Primo pane

2012-01-12T04:17:00.001-05:00

I don't think she's born with it.

2012-01-12T02:19:00.001-05:00

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

(thanks to 'znik for passing this along to me.)

For your reference

2012-01-10T00:26:00.001-05:00

Pâte feuilletée

slightly modified from http://lapatisseriejessica.blogspot.com/2010/03/pate-feuilletee.html

Ingredients:

250 g flour
5.5 oz water
5 g salt (about 2 tsp)
2 oz butter
6 oz butter

Preparation:

Put the flour, water, salt, and 2 oz butter in a kitchen mixer on medium speed for about 5 minutes, until the dough is a little sticky but mostly smooth.

Put the remaining 6 oz butter in plastic wrap to cover, and smash it until it forms a square.

Remove the dough from the mixer bowl, covering it in plastic wrap and smoothing it to a rectangular shape, like the butter.

Refrigerate the dough and the butter for two hours.

Remove the dough and the butter from the fridge. Unwrap the dough, and roll it out into a large rectangle, using a bit of flour if necessary to prevent its sticking to the counter top. Remove the butter from the plastic wrap, and place it in the middle of the dough.

Then fold the dough into thirds.

First turn and fold: Turn the dough 90 degrees, roll it into a large rectangle again, and fold it into thirds again. Second turn and fold: Turn the dough 90 degrees, roll it into a large rectangle, and fold it into thirds again.

Wrap it in plastic wrap once again, and refrigerate for two hours.

Remove the dough from the fridge, and unwrap it. Third turn and fold: Roll it out into a large rectangle again, and fold it into thirds. Fourth turn and fold: Turn the dough 90 degrees, and roll it into a large rectangle; fold it into thirds again. Wrap it, and return it to the fridge for an other two hours.

Repeat the turning, rolling, and folding process two more times, refrigerating once in between, such that the dough is folded a total of eight times.

Now the dough is ready for use. If possible, let the dough sit in the fridge another 4 hours to overnight before use.

Croissants:

Roll the dough into a large rectangle, and then cut it into little triangles; roll them up. Paint them with a mixture of powdered sugar and an egg yolk, and bake them at 350^F for approximately 15 minutes (or longer, if the croissants are large).

As a variation, stuff the croissants with apples, chocolate, cheese, or whatever strikes your fancy before rolling up the croissant and baking.

Enjoy!

Shelley in the wings

2012-01-08T18:04:00.001-05:00

Michelle Obama and the Evolution of a First Lady

by Jodi Kantor

from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/politics/michelle-obamas-evolution-as-first-lady.html

Michelle Obama has been an anxious spouse, eager to help President Obama succeed.

Michelle Obama in 2009 at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner in Washington. Interviews with more than 30 current and former aides, as well as some of the first couple’s closest friends, show that Michelle Obama has been a little-recognized force in her husband’s administration and that her story has been one first of struggle, then turnaround and greater fulfillment.

Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.

In the days after the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010, Barack Obama was even-keeled as usual in meetings, refusing to dwell on the failure or lash out at his staff. The first lady, however, could not fathom how the White House had allowed the crucial seat, needed to help pass the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda, to slip away, several current and former aides said.

To her, the loss was more evidence of what she had been saying for a long time: Mr. Obama’s advisers were too insular and not strategic enough. She cherished the idea of her husband as a transformational figure, but thanks in part to the health care deals the administration had cut, many voters were beginning to view him as an ordinary politician.

The first lady never confronted the advisers directly — that was not her way — but they found out about her displeasure from the president. “She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama confided, according to aides.

Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff, repeated the first lady’s criticisms to colleagues with indignation, according to three of them. Mr. Emanuel, in a brief interview, denied that he had grown frustrated with Mrs. Obama, but other advisers described a grim situation: a president whose agenda had hit the rocks, a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence.

The Michelle Obama of January 2012 is an expert motivator and charmer, a champion of safe causes like helping military families and ending childhood obesity, an increasingly canny political player eager to pour her popularity into her husband’s re-election campaign. But interviews with more than 30 current and former aides, as well as some of the first couple’s closest friends, conducted for “The Obamas,” a new book, show that she has been an unrecognized force in her husband’s administration and that her story has been one first of struggle, then turnaround and greater fulfillment.

Mrs. Obama is a supportive but often anxious spouse, suspicious of conventional political thinking, a groundbreaking figure who has acutely felt the pressures and possibilities of being the first African-American in her position and a first lady who has worked to make her role more meaningful.

Initially, she had considered postponing her move to the White House for months; after arriving, she bristled at its confinements and obligations — unable to walk her dog without risking being photographed, and monitored by her husband’s aides for everything from how she decorated the family’s private quarters to whether she took makeup artists on overseas trips.

New to the ways of Washington but impassioned about what her husband had been elected to do, she saw herself as a guardian of values. She was sometimes harder on her husband’s team than he was, eventually urging him to replace them, and the tensions grew so severe that one top adviser erupted in a meeting in 2010, cursing the absent first lady.

“She has very much got his back,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime strategist, in an interview. “When she thinks things have been mishandled or when things are off the track,” he continued, “she’ll raise it, because she’s hugely invested in him and has a sense of how hard he’s working, and wants to make sure everybody is doing their work properly.”

Mrs. Obama’s difficulties illuminate some of the president’s central challenges in the White House, including how the Obamas’ freshness to political life, a selling point in 2008, became a liability in office. Her worries about his staff point to a chief executive with little management experience who clung to an inner circle less united than it appeared. (Mr. Emanuel’s relationship with the president grew so strained that the chief of staff secretly offered to resign in early 2010; Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, had a tense relationship with Mrs. Obama and with Valerie Jarrett, another adviser). She shared the president’s ambivalence about political chores and the back-patting and schmoozing that can help get things done in Washington.

Like many of the president’s supporters, Mrs. Obama was anxious about the gap between her vision of her husband’s presidency and the reality of what he could deliver. Her strains with the advisers were part of a continuing debate over what sort of president Mr. Obama should be, with Mrs. Obama reinforcing his instincts for ambitious but unpopular initiatives like the overhaul of health care and immigration laws, casting herself as a foil to aides more intent on preserving Congressional seats and poll numbers.

“She does think there are worse things than losing an election,” Susan S. Sher, the first lady’s former chief of staff, said shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. “Being true to yourself, for her, is definitely more important.” Back then, Mrs. Obama sometimes talked about what would happen if her husband lost in 2012. “I know we’ll be fine,” she told Ms. Sher.

Sasha Obama ran ahead of President Obama and Mrs. Obama after their Christmas vacation in Hawaii at the White House in 2010. As Michelle Obama realized over the summer and fall of 2008 that she was likely to become first lady, she asked a question that probably would have surprised outsiders: could she and her children delay moving to the White House?

Deep Frustrations

As Michelle Obama realized over the summer and fall of 2008 that she was likely to become first lady, she asked a question that probably would have surprised outsiders: could she and her children delay moving to the White House? Perhaps it was better, she told aides and friends, to remain in Chicago until the end of the school year, giving her children more time to adjust, rather than coming right at the inauguration. Her notion, though short-lived, was telling: she didn’t understand or care what sort of message it would send to a public enthralled by the new first family, and she had trepidations about life in the spotlight, let alone the prospect of residing in a monument-museum-office-military compound-terrorist target-home.

She ultimately decided to go to Washington immediately, not because of the obligations of office, but because of “wanting her family to be together,” Ms. Jarrett said.

Even as Mrs. Obama dazzled Americans with her warmth, glamour and hospitality early in the presidency, she was also deeply frustrated and insecure about her place in the White House, said aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of concern about discussing internal strife.

The first couple declined to be interviewed.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, she had given up her career for what initially seemed to her a shapeless post, and she tried to wriggle out of some ceremonial events that she saw as not having much purpose, including the annual luncheon for Congressional spouses held by the first lady since 1912. She tried to limit her public exposure, saying she would work only two days a week; inside the White House, the difficulty of getting Mrs. Obama to agree to doing an event became a running joke.

Mrs. Obama received hugs after she read to third grade students who participated in an after-school program at the Ferebee-Hope Elementary School in Washington in 2009. As first lady she has championed safe causes like helping military families and ending childhood obesity.

The confinement of the White House was also a shock; suddenly she was cut off from her old life and rituals, and she hesitated even to take her daughters to school or some soccer games for fear of causing a fuss. The family had intended to return to Chicago frequently, but their first attempt was so complicated — their brick-front home was shrouded in black curtains to foil snipers, and because they couldn’t just buy groceries anymore, Navy stewards fed them in their own home — they seldom returned. While the president found Camp David artificial and cut off, the first lady loved it because she could roam free of prying photographers.

“I don’t think any of us contemplated how isolating this whole experience would be,” Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend from Chicago, said in an interview. “I don’t think this is a fun part about being the first family for any of them.”

Mrs. Obama often found herself caught in an internal debate about how the Obamas should look and live, travel and entertain. As the first African-American first lady, she wanted everything to be flawless and sophisticated; she felt “everyone was waiting for a black woman to make a mistake,” a former aide said.

Mr. and Mrs. Obama walked across the White House South Lawn after a trip back from Texas in 2009. For all of the first lady’s newness, she was quick to identify problems. From the start she worried that the White House was not presenting a clear, compelling story of the president’s actions to the public, a former aide said. She also told her own advisers that she wanted a more central role in communicating the administration’s message.

But her husband’s advisers — in particular, Mr. Gibbs — were worried that the White House might appear oblivious to public anger about joblessness, banker bailouts and bonuses. The result was constant, anxious give-and-take between the East and West Wings about vacations, décor, entertainment, even matters as small as whether to announce the hiring of a new florist.

“We all have watched what happens when people get caricatured,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview, explaining why he policed such personal matters. With a mistake like John Edwards’s $400 haircut in 2007, “there’s no way to correct that.” Other aides said there was a reason Mr. Gibbs became the main enforcer of the rules of political life: because Mr. Obama, all too aware that his wife never wanted that life, would not.

For all of the first lady’s newness, she was quick to identify problems. From the start she worried that the White House was not presenting a clear, compelling story of the president’s actions to the public, a former aide said. She also told her own advisers that she wanted a more central role in communicating the administration’s message; the West Wing failed to consider how she fit in with her husband’s broader narrative, she protested.

She particularly wanted to help sell the health care overhaul in spring 2009. “Figure out how to use me effectively,” she told her aides. “This is my priority.” But West Wing advisers, recalling the public resentment of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s involvement in health care as first lady, mostly declined her offer.

Mrs. Obama waited to greet Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, during a dinner at Winfield House in London. Those concerned with protocol faulted Mrs. Obama for putting her arm around the waist of Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to London, and British commentators sniffed at the gifts the Obamas brought.

Mr. Emanuel, who told colleagues that his battles as a staffer with Mrs. Clinton back then had taught him to steer clear of first ladies, mostly avoided Mrs. Obama. The tense relationship between the East and West Wings remained a muted matter, but the strains eventually became deep enough that the first lady’s team held a retreat in the winter of 2010 to discuss the problem. Ms. Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, served as an envoy and tried to smooth relations. But Ms. Jarrett’s mix of roles — she had her own West Wing portfolio, acted as Michelle Obama’s advocate, and was so close to the Obamas that she vacationed with them — created its own tensions.

That summer, in exchange for a key vote on an energy bill, Mr. Emanuel, without asking the first lady’s permission, promised Allen Boyd, a Florida congressman, that she would appear at an event. Annoyed, she attended the event, but registered her broader disapproval by refusing to commit to campaigning for the midterms. She eventually withheld agreement for nearly a year, according to former East and West Wing advisers. Instead she focused on an agenda of her own.

Her reluctance to campaign left Mr. Emanuel incredulous, according to two aides: The elections were already looking like a potential bloodbath, and the White House was going to face them without the president’s popular spouse?

Mrs. Obama made remarks on the need for health insurance reform and its impact on women and children during an event at the White House in 2009. She particularly wanted to help sell the health care overhaul. “Figure out how to use me effectively,” she told her aides. “This is my priority.”

Stuck on the Sidelines

Michelle Obama never wanted to be the kind of first lady who interfered with West Wing business, she told her aides. It was her husband’s administration, not hers, she sometimes said. She had little appetite or expertise for policy detail, and she knew the history of first ladies —like Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Clinton — who had been deemed meddlers, unelected figures who wielded unearned power.

And yet as the administration hit obstacle after obstacle in 2010 —Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, a health care law that squeaked through Congress yet remained unpopular, the Gulf oil spill and the approach of the midterm elections — Mrs. Obama became increasingly concerned.

Later Mr. Emanuel would glide into the Chicago mayor’s office, partly on the basis of his strong ties to Mr. Obama, but by a year into the administration, his relationship with the president had grown strained. While he relied heavily on Mr. Emanuel, especially in dealing with Congress, Mr. Obama told advisers that he had concerns about his chief of staff’s overall management and planning skills, along with his outbursts toward staff members. Mr. Emanuel openly said that he thought the health care overhaul had been a bad idea, and after accounts of his views began to surface in the news media in early 2010, he went into the Oval Office and offered his resignation to Mr. Obama, according to several colleagues.

The chief of staff “understood that the stories were an embarrassment and felt like he owed it to him to offer his resignation,” Mr. Axelrod said. The president declined to accept it, telling Mr. Emanuel that his punishment was to stay and push through the health care measure, according to Mr. Axelrod and others. Mr. Emanuel declined to comment on the matter.

Mrs. Obama planted a vegetable garden on the South Lawn in 2010, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II.

But that spring, Mrs. Obama made it clear that she thought her husband needed a new team, according to her aides. When the president decided to deliver a lofty speech about overhauling immigration laws in June 2010, even though there was no legislation on the table and the effort could hurt vulnerable Democrats, Mr. Emanuel objected. Aides did not produce the speech he wanted and the president stayed up much of the night rewriting — but the address drew a flat reception. Mr. Obama was irritated, two advisers said, and told Ms. Jarrett to keep an eye on other top staff members to make sure that they delivered what he wanted.

Several West Wing aides said they had heard secondhand that Mrs. Obama was angry about the incident. Later, they said they wondered: was the president using his wife to convey what he felt?

In September 2010, after a summer of infighting throughout the West Wing, things finally exploded.

Early on Sept. 16, Robert Gibbs was scanning the news when a story stopped him short: according to a new French book, Michelle Obama had told Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, that living in the White House was “hell.” It was a potential disaster — the equivalent of the $400 haircut, Mr. Gibbs feared, coming just weeks before election day and on the heels of a vacation in Spain that had drawn accusations of lavish spending.

Mr. Gibbs asked her aides to find out if she had said anything even close (no, the answer came back), and then fought the story back for hours, having the book translated and convincing the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. By noon the potential crisis had been averted.

But at Mr. Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. staff meeting the next day, Ms. Jarrett announced that the first lady had concerns about the White House’s response to the book, according to several people present. All eyes turned to Mr. Gibbs, who started to steam.

“Don’t go there, Robert, don’t do it,” Mr. Emanuel warned.

“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” Mr. Gibbs yelled, adding expletives. He interrogated Ms. Jarrett, whose calm only seemed to frustrate him more. The two went back and forth, Ms. Jarrett unruffled, Mr. Gibbs shaking with rage. Finally, several staff members said, Mr. Gibbs cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.

Mr. Gibbs later acknowledged the outburst but said he had misdirected his rage and accused Ms. Jarrett of making up the complaint. After the book incident, he “stopped taking her at all seriously as an adviser to the president,” Mr. Gibbs said, adding, “Her viewpoint in advising the president is that she has to be up and the rest of the White House has to be down.”

Ms. Jarrett declined to discuss the incident; two East Wing aides said she had misspoken, and that Mrs. Obama had not made any criticism.

Colleagues defended both parties. Mr. Gibbs had devoted years to the Obama cause, some said. Ms. Jarrett was trustworthy, said others, including Peter M. Rouse, another senior adviser. The blowup proved not only the fractures in the once-unified Obama team, but just how complicated the nexus between the first couple and staff members in the White House had become.

Mrs. Obama helped the children of military families decorate cookies in the State Dining Room of the White House in 2011. Impassioned about what her husband had been elected to do, Mrs. Obama saw herself as a guardian of values.

Forging a New Role

By then, Michelle Obama’s trajectory in the White House was changing. She was mastering and subtly redefining the role that had once seemed formless to her, and becoming more acclimated to her new life.

Sometimes her work seemed like an answer, in miniature, to what was going wrong with the presidency. If her husband’s health care law was unpopular and at risk of being reversed, she would throw herself into her campaign on nutrition and exercise, which had similar end goals — improving health, lowering costs. If her husband wasn’t connecting with audiences, she would win them over with vibrant speeches.

Her popularity, combined with her husband’s eroding support, gave her more leverage than she had early in the administration. An Oval Office meeting a few weeks before the 2010 midterms captured her changing position.

The location was the president’s domain, but the meeting was held to appease the first lady, who was finally agreeing to campaign for the midterm elections. One by one, members of the political team came before the Obamas, laying out arguments, details, statistics about how the first lady could help capture votes. In an interview the year before, the first couple had rejected the idea that they were using their marriage for political gain. (Most photos of them are “ somebody else’s images,” the first lady had said.) Now they absorbed polling data that showed that Democratic voters loved seeing them together, according to several participants at the meeting.

“This is a great presentation,” the president said with an I-never-get-this-treatment grin: aides were now doing things on his wife’s terms, with planning and precision.

Still, Mrs. Obama agreed to only eight campaign stops, fewer than the political team had wanted. “She basically agreed to do nothing,” one aide said.

The Obamas at the White House in 2010. After arriving, Mrs. Obama bristled at its confinements — she was monitored by her husband’s aides for everything from how she decorated family quarters to whether she took makeup artists on overseas trips. But if Mrs. Obama has sometimes been an internal critic, she is also her husband’s most determined advocate.

Now that her husband faces a tough re-election fight, that tentativeness has vanished: She is all in, she has told aides. If Mrs. Obama has sometimes been an internal critic, she is also her husband’s most determined advocate. Though she still avoids detailed policy or strategy discussions, she now has the role she sought in amplifying his message, speaking alongside him at Fort Bragg, N.C., about the end of the Iraq war, spotlighting her veteran hiring initiatives to push his stalled jobs bills, even sharing his weekly radio address. “To me, she seems more content than I’ve seen her throughout this process since he’s been running for president, which is a very good thing,” Mr. Axelrod said.

The worse things got for her husband in 2011, the more she rallied to his side, buoying him personally and politically. In August, after the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington reached their painful conclusion, Mrs. Obama gave a party for his 50th birthday, warning guests not to leave early and delivering a stemwinder of a toast in praise of her husband.

As the sun faded, the 150 guests — friends, celebrities, officials — sat on the South Lawn, listening to the first lady describe her version of Barack Obama: a tireless, upright leader who rose above Washington games, killed the world’s most wanted terrorist and still managed to coach his daughter Sasha’s basketball team. The president, looking embarrassed, tried to cut her off, several guests said, but she told him he had to sit and listen.

She also thanked him for putting up with how hard she had been on him. At that line, a few of the advisers glanced at each other in recognition.

This article was adapted from “The Obamas,” by Jodi Kantor, which will be published Tuesday by Little, Brown & Company.

Winter wonderful

2012-01-07T03:35:00.000-05:00

the heiress

the rest of us

Old Navy women's lightweight ruffle bomber jacket in braised tofu, $34.94

Macy's Karl Lagerfield vest, faux fur pocket scarf in grey, $22.49

Macy's Karen Scott sweater, long sleeve solid turtleneck in ebony black, $10.99

Macy's Kut from the Kloth pants, Diana skinny corduroy in olive, $32.24

Dansko Buffy in black kid suede, $185.00

Urban fabulous

2012-01-07T03:18:00.001-05:00

more stuff i'm trying to convince jak she'd look great in

the heiress

the rest of us

Old Navy women's cropped blazer in black jack, $34.99

Lauren by Ralph Lauren Rosana Long-Sleeve Ruffle Plaid Printed Button-Down in multi, $59.99

Old Navy women's The Rock Star jeggings in black, $34.94

Elie Tahari Janine Driver 4 in black Nappa, $198.00

Military prep

2012-01-07T03:06:00.003-05:00

i'm tring to boss my wonderful sister-in-law, jak, into wearing the clothes i pick out for her for an upcoming trip. the following posts are a few inspiration outfits i've put together for her. usually in heiress and the rest of us posts i do the best i can to find near-replicas of the pieces. but these next few outfits were assembled slightly differently: (1) i used pieces that i thought jak would actually wear for hours of trekking in various cities. this most often affected the shoes, moving from heels to flats. (2) i modified the looks slightly while keeping with the spirit of the outfit to select pieces that i thought jak would also want to wear again once she got home. (3) and, finally, i repeated multiple pieces of clothing across posts, keeping in mind jak's packing limitations.

the heiress

the rest of us

Old Navy women's belted military-style jacket in pine needles, $19.99

Old Navy women's perfect cardigan in black jack, $24.94

Lauren by Ralph Lauren Rosana Long Sleeve Ruffle Plaid Printed Button Down in multi, $59.99

INC International Concepts Pants, Skinny Leg High Waist Crackle Glaze in black, $33.74

Cole Haan Air Whitley Tall Boot in black, $174.95

Rock the Casbah

2012-01-05T21:57:00.000-05:00

so, tonight we tried something a little bit different, a little bit experimental, for dinner. drawing very loosely from heidi swanson's vegetarian split pea soup and more closely though still with significant variation from yotam ottolenghi's lentils with roasted tomatoes, marinated onions, and creamy cheese (adapted at turntable kitchen).

i would call this a success. in the future (the FU-ture, the FU-ture, the FU-ture) i would experiment with other types of roast veg and even different starchy bases. the general layering and especially the vinaigrette are killer and well worth repeating.

so, here it is.

Split Peas, Roasted Vegetables, and Creamy Goat Cheese

serves, like, a ton of people—maybe 8 as a side? more?

Ingredients:

2 cups butternut squash, 1" dice

2 large onions, one in 1" dice, the other chopped

5 large garlic cloves, trimmed and peeled, but left whole

4 stalks fresh thyme

extra-virgin olive oil

salt

pepper

1 large red onion, thinly sliced

3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

2 cups dried split peas, picked over for stones and rinsed clean

4+ cups water

3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley

4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill (or 3 tablespoons dried)

creamy goat cheese (I used chevre)

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 420^F. On a large, rimmed baking tray, toss the squash, first onion, 4 garlic cloves, and thyme with a few tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, seasoning liberally with salt and pepper. Roast for 40 minutes, stirring halfway through. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool.
Place the sliced red onion in a shallow, wide dish, and drizzle with the vinegar. Season with salt. Mix, and allow to marinate.
In a large pot, saute the second onion in a tablespoon of olive oil until soft, about 8 minutes. Add the lentils and 4 cups of water, and bring to the boil, skimming foam from the surface when necessary. Reduce heat to a simmer, and cook for 20 minutes until most of the water has been absorbed.
Drain the lentils, reserving the water, and place the lentils in a large mixing bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil, salt, pepper, the fifth smashed garlic clove, and the red onions with marinade. Allow to cool slightly. Mix in the parsley and dill, and taste for seasonings, correcting with additional salt, pepper, and olive oil as necessary.
In the pot used to cook the lentils, simmer the reserved lentil water over medium-high heat with 1/4 cup olive oil, a liberal sprinkling of salt, and a liberal sprinkling of smoked paprika. Whisk until reduced by half, approximately 3 minutes.
Dish the lentil mixture onto a large platter, placing slices of the goat cheese on top. Ladle the roasted vegetables over the top. Drizzle the paprika oil over the top. Serve.

NOTES: I think adding the freshly squeezed lemon juice and zest of one lemon to the lentils would be an amazing addition. And cooking the lentils in stock would amp up the awesome. I'm going to try this over couscous and quinoa next. Enjoy!

inspiration pics

Funny girl

2012-01-05T00:26:00.000-05:00

Flick Chicks: A guide to women in the movies
by Mindy Kaling
from http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/10/03/111003sh_shouts_kaling

A few years ago, I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out several of my favorite movies, and they wanted to see if I had any feature ideas. I was very excited. I have a great job writing for “The Office,” but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean. It’s snobby and grossly aspirational, but it’s true.

The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”

For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.

I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised at how often they are correct. Based on what I’ve learned from my time in Hollywood, the following titles are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theatre near you:

     “Bananagrams 3D”
     “Apples to Apples 4D” (The audience is pummelled with apples at the end of the movie.)
     “Crest Whitestrips”
     “Sharks vs. Volcanoes”
     “King Tut vs. King Kong”
     “Streptococcus vs. Candidiasis” (Strep Throat vs. Yeast Infection)
     “The Do-Over”
     “The Switcheroo”
     “Street Smart”
     “Street Stupid” (“Street Smart” sequel)
     “Fat Astronaut”
     “The Untitled Liam Neeson Vendetta Project”
     “Human Quilt” (horror movie)
     “The Cute Bear from Those Toilet-Paper Ads Movie”

Those movies all sound great to me, and, incidentally, I am prepared to write any of them, if there is interest. But what I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from enjoying them.

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life. Here are some examples:

     The Klutz
When a beautiful actress is cast in a movie, executives rack their brains to find some kind of flaw in the character she plays that will still allow her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would pay to see that? A female who is not one hundred per cent perfect-looking in every way? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours.

So they make her a Klutz.

The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it’s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it’s Fred Tom). The Klutz clangs into stop signs while riding her bike and knocks over giant displays of fine china in department stores. Despite being five feet nine and weighing a hundred and ten pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.

     The Ethereal Weirdo
The smart and funny writer Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe this archetype after seeing Kirsten Dunst in the movie “Elizabethtown.” This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans with her. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She likes to dance in the rain and she weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She might spin a globe, place her finger on a random spot, and decide to move there. The Ethereal Weirdo appears a lot in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her. But she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.

     The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All
I regularly work sixteen hours a day. Yet, like most people I know who are similarly busy, I’m a pleasant, pretty normal person. But that’s not how working women are depicted in movies. I’m not always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and yelling, “I have no time for this!” Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to “relearn” how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something. And since when does holding a job necessitate that a woman pull her hair back in a severe, tight bun? Do screenwriters think that loose hair makes it hard to concentrate?

     The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead
If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man. I am fascinated by Mom’s sordid early life. I would rather see this movie than the one I bought a ticket for.

I am so brainwashed by the young-mom phenomenon that when I saw the poster for “The Proposal” I wondered for a second if the proposal in the movie was Ryan Reynolds’ suggesting that he send his mother, Sandra Bullock, to an old-age home.

     The Sassy Best Friend
You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.

     The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting
Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like “It’s Complicated” compensates for five scenes of Diane Keaton being caught half naked in a topiary. But I can’t suspend disbelief enough, for instance, if the gorgeous and skinny heroine is also a ravenous pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie—her parents, her friends, her boss—are all complicit in this huge lie. They constantly tell her to stop eating. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who obviously lost weight to play the likable lead character, has to say things like “Shut up, you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!” If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.

     The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery
How many freakin’ art galleries are out there? Are people buying visual art on a daily basis? This posh/smart/classy profession is a favorite in movies. It’s in the same realm as kindergarten teacher or children’s-book illustrator in terms of accessibility: guys don’t really get it, but it is likable and nonthreatening.

Art Gallery Woman: “Dust off the Warhol. You know, that Campbell’s Soup one in the crazy color! We have an important buyer coming into town, and this is a really big deal for my career. I have no time for this!”

The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: “He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!”

There are, like, nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad. None of them look like Patrick Dempsey.

Shrunken heads swagged from the mantel

2012-01-04T21:08:00.000-05:00

dj wrote:

sometimes restoration hardware just gets it STUNNINGLY wrong.

Jak wrote:

now i know what to get you for Christmas next year!

dj wrote:

just make sure some of the babies are crying. otherwise it will be too unrealistic, and i won't want it.

jak wrote:

oh, they'll all be crying. they'll ALL be crying.

herf wrote:

*incontinent* this screams X-files to me.

dj wrote:

it explains what's going on in my soul RIGHT NOW.

For sale

2012-01-03T03:27:00.002-05:00

some real estate agent out there just knew it was a good idea to stage the dining room this way.

Ten months in . . .

2012-01-02T18:44:00.000-05:00

the assimilation is nearing completion. just now i found myself walking through the spitting rain of a PNW winter, no umbrella, hoodie defiantly raised, a stainless-steel composting pail in my left hand, and a steaming hot coffee in my right. the only thing missing was probably a pair of ugly and absurdly comfortable organic shoes.

First purchase of 2012?

2012-01-02T00:53:00.003-05:00

I take my breakfast meats with coffee

2011-12-30T17:00:00.001-05:00

Capitol

2011-12-30T16:45:00.002-05:00

Mos def

2011-12-30T14:31:00.002-05:00

Simply festive

2011-12-26T16:31:00.003-05:00

Ecksmuss eve feast

2011-12-26T16:29:00.002-05:00

large Italian antipasto platter with breadsticks

garden-vegetable lasagne

classic roast turkey

panettone panzanella with pancetta and brussels sprouts

vegetable ribbons

champagne

chocolate mousse layer cake

assorted Sicilian cookies

assorted gourmet cupcakes from Cupcake Royale

decaf coffee

eggnog

Christmas gift

2011-12-26T15:52:00.000-05:00

It's like gorilla ornament high-fiving a shark ornament in front of an explosion ornament

2011-12-26T15:41:00.000-05:00

just because i'm pretty don't mean i'm deep

Dinner and Downton: the Adios, Guillermo edition

Pureed lovely

Winter wonderfrau

I am married to Lady Sybil Crawley

This is probably not true

Viszyul poemtry

Sweet reminiscence

Recommended

Keep on pushing

Hot off the press

Raspberry seed in my molar

Primo pane

I don't think she's born with it.

For your reference

Shelley in the wings

Winter wonderful

Urban fabulous

Military prep

Rock the Casbah

Funny girl

Shrunken heads swagged from the mantel

For sale

Ten months in . . .

First purchase of 2012?

I take my breakfast meats with coffee

Capitol

Mos def

Simply festive

Ecksmuss eve feast

Christmas gift

It's like gorilla ornament high-fiving a shark ornament in front of an explosion ornament