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WQXR fan mail from TV haters in the 1950s. My favorite sentence: “I find your station eminently satisfactory for my pleasure hours.”

Found via this send of WQXR’s History Notes newsletter, which are “slices of curious, eclectic, and fascinating WNYC/WQXR history in text and sound links.”

I made another blobby chocolate cookie!

Actually, I messed up this recipe. This was supposed to be Yossy Arefi’s “Rocky Road Brownie Cookie” from Snacking Bakes, but I put in three times more marshmallows than the recipe called for. (I had a bag of them I wanted to get rid of.)

What could possibly go wrong? Now I know! The marshmallows (of course) melted and essentially turned the cookies into pools of lava goo.

The verdict is that these still taste really good, but they are impossibly crumbly. The cookie pictured is the only one that remained intact from the drop-cookie batch — after seeing this, I switched gears and baked the other batch in a loaf pan for 15 mins, and they came out much better as bars.

The rest of the crumbly bits are all in my freezer, and I’ll be using them as future ice cream toppings. We learn!

January coping: In a world in which I am unable to hibernate, I seek solace by waking up in the dark, leaving the house as the sun rises, running or lifting heavy things for the better part of an hour, working in a quiet space all by myself, punctuating the day with snacks and meals, going on one long walk if weather permits, then returning home.

I have seen such beautiful sunrises and sunsets in this first week of 2024.

These are all the books I read in 2023! Sadly, I did not continue my streak of randomly reading 37 books as I had in previous years. Possibly because I was more “outside” this year than the last few.

My favorite book of 2023 by a long shot is Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil. For someone who is extremely picky about fiction, I found this one enjoyable on every level. Cerebral, sharp, a little off-kilter. An incisive commentary on our current tech-y times without ever feeling heavy-handed. The perfect length at 288 pages. I recommend to all!

O Caledonia, A Terrible Country, and The Book of Difficult Fruit were also fantastic. Good fall, winter, and spring books, respectively.

Some of the others here have aged interestingly.

I am a proud papá, siring new focaccia loaves into this world.

Trying to figure out the best way to document my baking projects, because I complete them mostly at night with bad lighting. Here’s a first attempt at something.

These are the Andes Mint Chocolate Cookies I made my boyfriend for Christmas. Chewy, BIG, and very texturally satisfying. Love a cookie that requires 4+ bites to eat.

I send you a postcard of Pulaski at night

Greetings from Chicago, city of light

le-corbustier