You know what makes New York great? There’s always something to complain about. Within minutes of this New York Post notice concerning tomorrow’s opening of the Christmas shops in Union Square, a reader had already rendered a verdict.

What a town! (Also, this person is not wrong.)

Going off twitter. Let me know when the liberals joking about the Holocaust (in response to Ailes’ comments) stop. All of it is awful.less than a minute ago via TweetDeck

Jake Tapper
jaketapper

People thought it was funny/crazy when Fox News honcho Roger Ailes said today that NPR executives are “the left wing of Nazism.” (Related! Now would be a good time to remind everyone that NPR’s federal funding is under 10% of its budget.) In any event, people made some jokes about NPR’s Nazi programming lineup, and how stupid this all was, and now Jake Tapper has stormed off the Internet. To be fair, “being against Holocaust jokes” is sort of a low bar in standards. We’ll be back with more breaking news after this commercial message. Hello, welcome back. For those still with us, Jake Tapper is back on Twitter!

no, i’m not peace-outing twitter. trying to stop a sick hashtag being pushed by people who should know better. “bags of hair” aint funny.less than a minute ago via TweetDeck

Jake Tapper
jaketapper

So for the record, “going off Twitter” means “not Tweeting for 24 minutes.”

Hmm, what else. OH RIGHT THE HEAD OF FOX NEWS IS GOING AROUND COMPARING NPR TO HITLER????

by Mary Anne Limoncelli

So you want to make Babka? Okay, but it’s quite the commitment! You’ll need to set aside about six hours of your life, and be prepared for things to get sticky.

You should know this is not some fancy Babka full of chocolate and cinnamon and cheese and whatever other abominations you Westerners have added to my Babka. This is Babka in its most pure form. Still interested? Alright then.

Wake up one morning. Roll directly out of bed and stagger in your pyjamas into the kitchen. Separate a dozen eggs, putting the yolks into the biggest bowl you own. You’ll need all dozen yolks now, but save the whites! You can make omelets or meringue or something. And oh, while you’re separating the eggs, get your sister to microwave a cup of WHOLE MILK until it’s slightly warm, but not hot. Tell her to add 3 yeast packets to the milk and make her stir it.

(I am sure there is a way to make Babka without a sister, but I do not know it. If you are not lucky enough to have a sister, find a family member you can semi-order around, or a friend with a few free hours.)

While the yeast is “blooming,” (ew) beat the egg yolks with a fork. Once the yeast/milk looks ready — it should be bubbly — pour it into the beaten egg yolks. Add two cups of flour, and mix that all up with that fork until it’s combined. Cover with one of those nice cloth napkins you have but never use, and put it somewhere warm — somewhere in the sun, perhaps?

Step one is done! While the Babka doubles in size, you can shower! And eat breakfast and have a coffee and realize that, oh boy, your nail polish is chipping like crazy and unless you want bits of nail polish in the babka, you better get all of that nail polish off, and then get the horrific acetone nailpolish remover off of your hands as well. Wash with soap, then wash soap off with copious amounts of water.

Okay! The Babka is roughly twice the size it was when you left it, right? If, at this point, your Babka bowl is more than halfway full, you’re screwed and need a bigger bowl. Alright. Get a wooden spoon. Put your damn Kitchenaid stand mixer away. Did my Babcia bring a Kitchenaid stand mixer over with her from Białystok when she was fleeing the Germans, on a boat that was shot at by U-boats? I THINK NOT. You will use no mixers, handheld or stand in this recipe. You will use wooden spoons, and you will use your hands. AND YOU WILL LOVE IT.

So. Take your wooden spoon and mix the batter for a moment, deflating the lovely rising that’s just occurred. Give your sister a box of white raisins, and tell her you need a cup of the good ones. This ensures that none of those horrific shriveled rock-like raisins make it into your Babka. While she is sorting raisins, dump in another 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of sugar, 2 sticks of unsalted butter into your bowl of Babka batter. (Yes, unsalted.) The butter should be pretty soft, but not quite liquid. Pour in a teaspoon of vanilla, preferably directly on top of the butter. Debate with your sister how much a “dash” of salt is, then sprinkle some salt onto the whole thing. Root through the liquor cabinet for the apricot brandy, which is all the way in the back because it only ever gets used for Babka. Carefully measure out a shot and pour that in. Then pour in a bit more “for extra flavor,” and because you never measure liquor. (If you must, you can substitute triple sec, cherry brandy, or any fruity thing; for nondrinkers, maybe elderflower syrup? Or a fruity extract.) Add in the hand-selected raisins from your sister. Ask her if she wants to start stirring, and let her do so.

While she does the initial stirring WITH A WOODEN SPOON, clear off half of the kitchen table. Scoop up some flour with the one-cup measure, and lay down a light sprinkling, leaving a bunch still in the cup. Take off your rings, and lick a fingernail. Taste like acetone? No? You’re good to go! Once the batter is essentially together, dump the Babka out on the table. Knead it as best you can. This will not be easy!

Your simple “push out, fold over, turn it 90 degrees” will not quite work, as Babka, being halfway between bread and cake, is also halfway between batter and dough. It will be sticky. The main thing you can do is keep a metal spatula handy, and keep scraping your dough off the table and towards the center. Sometimes you can try and hold all the dough in one hand while you scrape the whole side of the table clean! (Note: this should not be possible — the dough should be loose enough that it oozes between your fingers and falls back onto the table long before you’ve scraped it all up.) Add more flour when necessary, but you really don’t want to add much more than ¾ a cup — let the kneading turn it from a stiff batter into what is, most definitely, dough. It is mostly through trial and error that you will find when this moment is, but it’s essentially when it starts to act like it is one cohesive unit. It should be far looser and moister than bread dough, but still definitely a dough.

Oh! This is essential. You must sing “Greensleeves” while kneading. You must. I tend to knead for about 20 minutes, give or take.

Okay! That was the hard part! Take the dough and put it back in your initial bowl, which, if you’re lucky, you’ve convinced your sister to wash for you. If she seems resistant, don’t worry about it — you pretty much scraped it clean right before you started kneading, right? Good. Cover the bowl again with that nice cloth napkin and put it somewhere warm. Now clean up the kitchen and your hands! You have about an hour before you need to do anything else with the Babka, so you could maybe run an errand! Or if you’re me, start a second Babka (this usually requires a written-out timeline) Anyway, do something with yourself for an hour — though I expect you’ll spend half that time cleaning up yourself/your kitchen.

After an hour’s passed, “punch down” the dough, except don’t. Deflate it gently, perhaps by turning it over and poking at it, or by just patting it. Punching the Babka as if you were an angry 15-year-old results in bruised knuckles when you hit the bottom of the bowl. This was step 3, and it is the easiest of the steps. You’ve got another hour off, and you should probably find your bundt pan and wash it — it’s covered in dust. And don’t you need to make cookies or something else as well?

Another hour passes, and it’s time to take the Babka out of its bowl, and put it into the INCREDIBLY WELL GREASED BUNDT PAN. I do use Pam, but only under duress — it is not authentic (see above re: U-boats). Probably back then they used lard but butter or the like works. When placing the dough into the bundt, make a hole in the dough so it looks like a giant doughnut, and then put it into the pan — do not try to put it in as a log and push the ends together. That results in an uneven Babka! Look at the top of the dough, relaxing in the Bundt pan. Are there any raisins sticking out? Push’em under, or pull dough over them! Burned raisins are bad. Cover it with that same napkin, and let it chill out (in a warm place! But not too hot!) for another hour.

Forty minutes in, preheat the oven to 350. Depending on your start time, you might be able to start drinking now! Anyway. Put the Babka into the oven, and then leave it for at least 40 minutes. At that point, pull it out and insert a cake tester deep into the Babka, and see if it comes out clean. If it does, try it 3 other places. If it comes out gooey, call your sister in, and ask if the Babka “looks too brown.” If it does, cover with tinfoil (careful!) and return it to the oven. Check every 5 minutes, and DO NOT leave it in the over for over an hour.

After the Babka comes out of the oven, let it sit for a little bit, maybe 20 minutes in the pan, unless it looks too brown, in which case, don’t wait. Get 2 large dinner plates and place one upside down, on top of the Babka. Using oven mitts, invert the Babka on the plate, and gently remove the bundt pan. Then, IMMEDIATELY, put the 2nd plate upside down on top of the Bakba, and flip the thing again, so it is oriented the same way it was in the bundt pan. Why? Because the top of it looks so pretty! That’s right, my Polish family serves bundts upside down. Which is to say, “right side up.” It is traditional.

Let the Babka cool down until it’s at room temperature, then fill a shot glass with water and GENTLY drop it down into the hole in the bundt. Wrap the whole thing carefully with saran-wrap, and leave it alone until the appointed time. Enjoy!

If you find this all too stressful, you can always consult The Old Warsaw Cookbook, which explains Babka nearly as well.

Mary Anne Limoncelli is mostly Polish, despite the last name.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

Hero Dog Put Down

I totally did not hear about this before now! “Target, Afghani Hero Dog, Is Euthanized by Mistake in U.S.” God, BRB, laying down with a sad.

Tough times for todgers on Knifecrime Island: “The recession is diminishing the contents of British men’s trousers in more ways than one, a sex survey suggests.” (What they mean by “more ways than one” there is that not only do British men have less money in their pants, they are also having problems with the drooping dongs that dangle therein.) But it’s not just the recession that is to blame for Albion’s defective dicks; the ladies of the land are knob-obsessed, sex-starved harpies who are gagging for it and will slice it right off if they don’t get it the way they want.

“We are seeing a real epidemic of anxiety related issues which will be causing many a bedroom bust up. Women appear to be less than understanding — and refuse to lower their maintenance levels both financially and sexually. They don’t find ‘losers’ attractive,” says some woman whose magazine conducted the survey showing the sorry state of UK cocks. The voracity of these rod-ravenous maidens is so stressful that many of the men admitted to longing for less pecker-pestering partners. Unfortunately, the cock-craving women of Britain have found that they do like it up ’em, and unless their men can figure out how to get those John Thomases standing back at full attention, they will find themselves out on the street, malfunctioning manhood in one hand, knife in the other.

Photo by gvillena, from Flickr.

This is big big news in rap. It’s a new song from Dr. Dre, who is pretty much inarguably the greatest producer in the music’s history. It’s also, reportedly, an advance single from Dre’s third solo album, Detox, a project rap fans have been waiting for, have know the title of, for nearly ten years now.

Delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed, Detox has taken on the almost mythical quality of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy before that $13 million fiasco finally arrived to free cans of Dr. Pepper for all but otherwise general disappointment. Detox is supposed to be really truly honestly coming out early next year. Dre is on the cover of next month’s XXL magazine announcing it and everything. Many people will believe it when they see it.

I don’t think it’s terrible at all. I don’t think Akon should be allowed into a studio with Dre (or, you know, Michael Jackson) but Snoop sounds good (“tighter than the pants on Will.I.Am,” in fact), and I like the sneaky strings that come creeping after the central beat. You can definitely imagine club-walls and chest-cavities quivering to this this winter. But after ten years? It seems slight, doesn’t it? And unfocused. If I’m trying to get high, I don’t want Akon’s reedy autotuned voice all talking in my ear. But hey, maybe its not even mastered to Dre’s final approval yet. Or maybe its been officially mastered, but it’s specially formulated so that you have to hear it through a pair of Beats by Dr. Dre headphones to fully appreciate it. I don’t know. I don’t have Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. But still and all, I hope and trust Dre has more in store for us.

Something more exciting. Something that sounds more like this, actually.

That track, made for Alabama rapper Yelawolf — who already has one of the most exciting rap songs of the year under his belt, “Pop the Trunk” — is much more like what I would have expected from Dre. It sounds like you’re listening to something from the future, which is always how Dre has sounded. Like he hears two years ahead of the rest of us, warp speed, and then brings it back and translates it through our speakers. The way those synths bend and ascend, all sci-fi and space-age — which is where we know Dre’s mind has been lately. (Does that sound more like Mars, you think? Or Saturn?) And the bells, anchoring the beat with some horror-movie, Black-Sabbathy ominousness. Signature Dre.

But that is not Dre who made that track. Rather, it’s a young producer from Akron, Ohio, Chris “Drama Beats” Pfaff. There’s lots that odd about Drama Beats, besides the unoriginality of his professional name (there is already a very well-known hip-hop producer with the too similar name of DJ Drama) and the fact that his photographer parents shot Lebron James’ senior high school portrait. Most interestingly, he was on the MTV reality show “Rob & Big.” Because he is the younger cousin of one of the show’s stars, professional skateboarder Rob Drydek. He came out to L.A. to break into the music biz. And he has!

And I am impressed. But man, it’s funny: more than anything else, this track is testimony to how important Dr. Dre is. You can hear a lot of 1995’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’.”

But also a key bit of “Boyz N Tha Hood.”

And “Natural Born Killaz.”

A little of Tupac’s “Hail Mary,” too. And some of Bone Crusher’s “Never Scared.” All sliced up and stretched out and updated to sound like something beaming back from 2014. Which is what we would have expected from Dre. Drama Beats is out-Dre-ing Dre!

by Ana Marie Cox And Jason Linkins

Here are GQ’s Ana Marie Cox and the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press editor Jason Linkins to explain the politics. Why are we seeing so much of the back of Obama? What indeed was Rahm planning? What is the deal with Bo? Is Joe Biden still alive?

Gratuitously magical. Hold on to these moments, Obama fans.

Ana Marie: I don’t know if this is a metaphor for the mood at the White House or what, but Pete Souza sure is taking a lot of pictures of Obama’s back.

Jason: Maybe Pete Souza will write a column for Politico about how frustrated he is with Obama withholding access? “How much money is left in your ‘The Obama White House has a messaging problem’ budget, VandeHei?”

Ana Marie: Seriously that is a lot of pix of Obama’s ass. Ass in mom jeans!

Jason: When Sasha fished her golf ball out of the hole, was John Boehner there, sipping on a Slurpee?

Ana Marie: Tanning on top of an overturned car?

Tell you one thing: Our Special Envoy for Middle East Peace does not seem like he’s paid very much attention to…no wonder it’s been taking awhile!

“And now, folks, a special treat, as Hillary performs her favorite tunes from ‘Anything Goes!’”

“Okay! Middle East Peace Process! Everyone synchronize their watches!”

Ana Marie: There’s no way to get around a throws like a girl joke here.

Jason: There’s also no way of getting around the fact that Bo could start for the Washington Nationals right now.

If this is how Obama looks before every staff meeting, I would be concerned.

Ana Marie: Ol’ Joe Biden, telling that same story about how he was almost president. Again.

Jason: I think Rahm is mulling whether he wants to whip out that Hillary-for-Joe switch plan he’s keeping behind his back.

Next: Obama’s Secret Notes!

Ana Marie: From the files of Pete Souza, official White House stalker.

Jason: Jesus! That’s like a scene from MANHUNTER! When does he invite Katie Johnson over to listen to “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida?”

Ana Marie: That was taken just to make sure there was a WH flickr feed photo Glenn Beck liked.

See that note? It’s a reminder to Obama that he has to meet with this senior advisors. We can only surmise by his body language — and the fact that he’s wearing a watch, so he fucking knows what fucking time it is — that whether these are the outgoing senior advisors or the incoming senior advisers — look: it means SHIT to him. (And OF COURSE THEY HAVE DECIDED WHO THE NEW SENIOR ADVISORS WILL BE. They did that last month.)

Even after two years, you can work at the White House and STILL get excited about the secret door.

Yep. Everyone once in a while, you come across a picture like this and think to yourself: “Wow, that really is a lot of white people.”

OH HAI National Security Advisor Gen. James L. Jones! What, you’re leaving? So soon? Ohthat’stoobadhere’sthedoorniceseeingyoustayintouchgoodbye.

Taken moments before Katie Johnson returned from her lunch break to exclaim: “LIKE YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR OWN OFFICE? Gah. And stop reading my mail.”

ANA: Oh, I like to think, he’s doing this thing we used to do at Mother Jones, where we’d sneak over to other people’s stations and send crazy and shocking emails to one another as jokes.

JASON: You know, it’s amazing that you don’t work at MOTHER JONES anymore, for some reason.

Ah, Pete Rouse. The charisma drips off him. He’s like two Rahms. Literally. With his appointment, Obama sends a clear message to uncooperative Republicans: “Your showers are about to get a lot scarier.”

See, assholes, he IS thinking about the economy.

Pete Souza, official White House photographer/stalker outwits Obama again! Mr. President, Mr. President, THE PHOTO IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Next: George Clooney and juice!

One of Karzai’s rules for diplomatic negotiations with the White House is that strike fourth-grade rules of etiquette apply. Also, after the meetings are over, everyone gets juice.

In the movie of the Obama White House, Pete Rouse will be played by George Clooney. (We’re also expecting a “Hollywood ending.”)

You should really enjoy your time with the President while you can, Political Director Patrick Gaspard!

Aw. That’s nice, Mr. President! But the point is for them to have a picture taken with you.

JASON: Wow, and here we thought that other meeting was white!

ANA MARIE: The difference is that these are the people who decide who gets to have health insurance!

Pete Souza brings “framing” to new lows.

Just so you know, here’s how your four living, non-Jimmy Carter presidents have marked their territory. (And yes, this means the LaRouchies are right!)

Ah, the terrorist fist bump. For Joe Biden, now just a reminder of happier, more intimate times.

“Most taxation has an over-burden in the form of distorting economic activity. But raising alcohol taxes actually moves us in the direction of economic efficiency. Even ignoring the costs alcohol imposes on the people who drink too much of it and on their families, the external costs of heavy drinking–costs on various public budgets plus losses to individuals as a result of drinking people outside their families — are several times as high as the taxes collected on it. So even in purely free-market terms, alcohol is currently grossly under-taxed; in effect, the rest of us get to subsidize the brewers and their best customers through our health insurance bills, our auto-insurance bills, and our police budgets.”
 — Okay, now I am starting to get concerned about all these deficit reduction plans.

The first victim of your basic Thanksgiving Day-only cooking skills is your pride. Cooking is easy, with practice, and once a year does not constitute practice. I know how to cook now, but that wasn’t always the case; I was once this victim. Once I realized that meals are not always exclusively cooked for you (thanks mom and dad!), I decided that I was going to contribute to Thanksgiving dinner, consistently. And like anyone else who feels invulnerable and is unafraid of failure, I quickly waded in over my head and chose baking as my new province. Dinner breads. Rolls and roll-type comestibles. Not the centerpiece, and not even a side, really. But I grew up Southern/suburban, and the ultimate delivery mechanism for gravy was not the taters or even the turkey, but the rolls. Rolls were unsung requisites, a load-bearing structure to the meal. So I would not be attracting too much attention to myself by choosing them, while at the same time I would carrying the entire T-Day dinner on my back. A perfect place to be, pride says.

Unfortunately, baking is hard.

It’s not insurmountable. All kinds of people can do it. But it is a steep learning curve. There is an astonishing array of variables that you don’t have to take into account when you, say, fry an egg — what kind of flour? what’s my altitude? how accurate is my oven? what the hell does “proofing” mean? And that’s assuming you are cooking in a “kitchen.” I’ve lived in New York City full-time since the mid-90s, and, like I said, I am come from the suburbs, so I know what a real kitchen looks like. It has counters, and appliances. Useless appliances. Vast acreage of counter space, a multiplicity of foosball tables’ worth of counter space. And tables! Like, one for eating on, and one for just stacking stuff on. And I was looking at cooking on a hot plate in a closet and an Easy Bake oven on a cardboard box in the bathroom. But it was just cooking, so how hard could it be?

From then going forward, I’ve made dinner rolls for at least ten separate Thanksgivings. They didn’t suck, this decade of dinner rolls, but each batch was a failure in its own way. The one time at the function with the Judge, with the oysters and Prosecco, when I nailed the buttery toothiness, but was working with less than happy yeast. At the mother-in-law’s, when they were billowy but sawdusty. The North Fork getaway, when the rolls were rationed, since the yield was a fraction of what I was led to believe. And last year, when the decision to let them un-rise in the trunk of a car while being transported was a not good decision. Good for anecdotes, at least, but ultimately my career of dinner roll-making has been marked by one or two rolls per event that I’d let someone that knows how to cook eat. I never caught any actual flak — “Oh, they’re fine.” — but I knew. I knew because I ate them. And the little frozen balls of dough you buy at the store, and then bake? I couldn’t beat them. The food you make with your own hands is sometimes like the little clay ashtray you made your parents when you were in kindergarten — of course it’s beautiful, our idiot kid made it! I am sick of being the idiot kid.

This year I’m changing tack. I’ll continue working on the dinner rolls, but on my own time. This year I’ll make something I know how to make: biscuits. I have extensive experience with biscuits, because I have extensive experience with sausage gravy, and sausage gravy is never served without biscuits. Biscuits are non-traditional, outside the ken of the archetypical T-Day, but they fit. They will be fresh, they will be delicious and I will nail them. I will be the Hero of the Beach. They are bready and they will soak up the gravy as good as the Parker House or the Hot Cross. They travel, and they keep. And in the spirit of surrender, not only am I going to make the biscuits, but I am going to make them the way I am comfortable making them — by using a certain pre-mixed baking product that is pretty ubiquitous.

Now I know how to make scratch biscuits, and it’s not really that hard, but you know what? I’ve only done that three or four times, and the end result is nearly indistinguishable. This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to wait until Wednesday, T minus one, and instead of dashing around the grocery to pick up the baking soda and the lard and the baking powder and should I use cake yeast this year? I am going to leisurely buy exactly two items: Ubiquitous Pre-Mixed Baking Product and milk. And the next day, I’m gonna eyeball the entire process, and save myself the stack of measuring cups in the sink. Big old bowl, generous heap of UPMBP and then enough milk so that the consistency is pliable but a little bit stretchy. Then I’m gonna throw that lump on a board and roll it out and flip it around and generally look busy, and when I’m done it’s gonna be a little bit thicker than you’d want, about an inch, maybe more. Then I’m gonna cut that sheet of dough into roughly round shapes and throw them on a sheet, and then repeat the process with the scraps. And then 450 degrees and ten or so minutes. Maybe a little brushed butter at the end. Yahtzee.

Yes, I am cheating, but I’m not going to feel bad about it. If I go in for the frozen dinner rolls, which are actually quite delicious, and then said that I made them myself, that I would feel bad about. But my biscuits will be made with my own hands. In fact, each biscuit will have all sorts of my hands all over it. I will have made the living hell out of those biscuits. And I won’t feel any worse about the UPMBP than I would over the cheap ass flour I would’ve bought, and the who-knows-how-old baking soda in my fridge. Will I admit to it? Well, I’d rather not, but I guess I’m going to have to. And when the locavore stuffing gets passed around, with the Prospect Park-foraged mushrooms, I’ll enjoy that too, and only smirk to myself a little.

Earlier I said that I know how to cook, and you know what they say: anyone who brags about prowess in the kitchen or in the sack probably has none. So I may well be that guy. But my biscuits are not bad, so my pride can take it.

Brent Cox is a professional chef writer in Brooklyn.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.

“At around 11 or 12, I became completely obsessed with reading, probably because I was in a hormonal shit storm and couldn’t deal with human beings. My recollection of my 6th grade year is spending each day with my head on my desk. After school, I went to the fantasy section of the Cambridge Public Library and sat on the floor, piling through each title; Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, which I read several times, Lloyd Alexander’s various books like Taran Wanderer, some series about dragons which I am blanking on, Ursula Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Narnia, etc.”
 — The Magnetic Fields’ Claudia Gonson discusses the books that have shaped her life. Worth a look.