Comfort and The Contrarians

Plus: Great movies to watch on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr federal holiday

I was all set to send out a new cookie recipe today, so you could bake yourself a little comfort if need be. You know, on the off chance you’re looking for an activity to keep yourself busy, say, Monday. But as I sat down to write this, my son handed me a piece of homemade bread, toasted, buttered and sprinkled thick with cinnamon sugar.

Proust can keep his madeleines. It turns out, cinnamon toast has the ability—in one blessed bite—to lower my shoulders from ear level, where they’d been since I read that Trump launched his own cryptocurrency Friday night, while he was off Diet Coke-ing and dining with his new crypto-bro buds. You can’t say Trump isn’t a great business innovator, why, his Trump cryptocurrency will provide an easy way for folks to grease the palms of the Trump family while Daddums is in office. The Office of the President of the United States.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was trying to help calm us all down.

Cinnamon toast! Yes. Cinnamon toast won’t save us from what lies before us with the incoming administration, but it can offer respite and perhaps it can transport you to a nicer time (as a historian I will never say ‘simpler time,’ no such thing ever existed) as it did for me. I was about six years old and in our Formica-rich kitchen in Summit, New Jersey. The bread was Pepperidge Farm, the butter was probably margarine, but the cinnamon sugar was stirred together in a little glass dish by my mom. My mother wasn’t a cookie baker, and why should she be, when Entenmann’s, Drake’s cakes and our local bakery, Trost’s already did that so well. So, cinnamon-toast, warm, crunchy and sweet, was what my mother made from sort-of scratch.

Unpaid promotion: My favorite cinnamon comes from pro-democracy spice purveyor Penzeys.

Of course, we will need more than cinnamon toast over the next four years. No way around it. Which is why I am honored to be part of The Contrarian, a newly created pro-democracy media group led by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen whose mission is to create a reliable source for news from independent sources. The work of contributors such as Joyce White Vance, Asha Rangappa, John Dean, Harry Litman and Andrew Weissman will provide the heavy lifting. I’m here to offer those cinnamon toast moments: some distraction, photos of my growing puppy and the cats who may some day tolerate him, and of course some literal nourishment with ideas for easy meals, and, of course, cookies. But, I’m a journalist, too, and as ever, will continue my own blend of pastries and politics. *

I’ll send out another post later tonight, with more ideas for baking and other distractions. In the meantime, a reminder from the brilliant actress Leslie Uggams on some great activities for January 20, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr federal holiday.

I’m grateful for all the new supporters who have joined, as well as my long-time followers, who now feel like friends. Let me know in the comments what kinds of recipes, specific or by category, you’d like to see. And remember, my current archive of over 200 recipes is currently available for free.

*I’m allowed one naff alliteration a year. That was it. Now here’s a photo of my pup:

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