★★★★ Faint clouds brushed the sky, and a bit of haze adhered to the landscape. Why, the three-year-old asked, were some windows open on the tower over there? The answer, determined experimentally, was that the air was worth letting in. More and more windows peeped open, as the discovery spread. The walk along Broadway was chilly facing uptown away from the sun and balmy coming back. The air felt clearer than it looked. The children sprinted off ahead; the open sidewalk a runway. Two potted palms in the curbside plant vendor’s array were flung over by the wind, toppling into the roadway. The sound of a bagpipe outside the 72nd Street subway control house carried, but could not overwhelm the other sounds on the busy air. By late afternoon, the persistent breeze had broken the grip of the warmth. The haze glowed with colors on the river, though if you looked past that, seeking the high ground in the distance, it just seemed grimy.

In Defense of Lists (c. 1977)

The Book of Lists was a sensation: produced by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace and Irving Wallace, along with a team of about sixty editors and contributors, it sold millions of copies. It was strange and funny and somewhat risqué. In retrospect, for a general interest trivia publication, it was also fairly progressive. (The last edition was published in 2005.)

But prefacing the the first edition, published in 1977, is an odd essay. It’s a preemptive defense of the listmaking project — a persuasive, or at least thorough, self-justification that our internet of lists, and barely recognizable list derivatives, never bothered to offer.

There are many people who love spring, and if they like to cook or eat, they might suggest famous springtime delicacies as evidence that spring isn’t just a forty-five-degree puddle of dirty rainwater. “What about asparagus?” they might ask. “Peas? Rhubarb? Fresh spring greens? Ramps? Fiddleheads?” Those are indeed all good things — even the last two which are wildly overrated and basically just differently shaped and absurdly overpriced scallions and asparagus stems, respectively.

Where the spring defenders are wrong is in asserting that these items are actually available for a reasonable chunk of spring — which I am identifying, for the record, as the months of March, April, and May. March and most of April are still, in terms of local produce, wintertime. Do not eat asparagus this week. Or peas or rhubarb. You won’t even be able to find non-supermarket-bagged spring greens. None of that is in season until, if we’re being generous, the last three days of April. With rare exceptions like the mango, the beginning of April is, in terms of availability of seasonal produce, exactly the same as the beginning of March. And the beginning of February.

One good thing you can still eat are some of the brassicas, sturdy champs which remain, if not fresh, then at least hardy and adequate through the winter and first two-thirds of spring. Cauliflower, kale, and, my favorite, broccoli, are our only friends during some of these months. People love broccoli now! It is respected and adored as a healthful and delicious vegetable. But many people are not eating the broccoli correctly, because they are eating only the florets.

Broccoli has two main edible parts, the florets — the dark green forest-y tops which are actually undeveloped flower buds — and the stalk — the pale green undercarriage like the trunk of a tree. I think people are generally aware that both of these parts are edible, but assume that the stalk is, I don’t know, not tasty? Or hard to work with? Tough and fibrous, maybe? And so the market has responded by offering bags of only the florets, theoretically saving you the trouble of trimming the unwanted stalks and throwing them out.

What those bags are actually doing is making the florets more vulnerable to going bad; removed from the stalk, they will turn limp, slimy, and unfit to eat very quickly, either due to a lack of airflow or too much moisture or simply the fact that there is nothing protecting them. Even worse, those pre-cut bags are ROBBING YOU OF THE STALK, which, if it was a separate vegetable from the florets, would be one of my all-time favorites. The stalk is so good! The texture is crisp and juicy, protected from going dry by the tough-ish outer skin. The flavor is mild and vegetal, like cabbage but without the sulfurous fartiness. It is fantastically versatile, great use in everything from roasts to raw salads to purees. The bag-sellers are crooks; never ever buy a bag of broccoli florets!

Some supermarkets have begun to sell bags of “broccoli slaw,” which is thinly sliced broccoli stalk and sometimes a slice of carrot in there for color, I guess. It can sometimes be dry — freshly sliced broccoli stalk is emphatically not — but is usually cheap and tastes good and is sort of a thumb in the eye to the broccoli floret bags, so I buy it sometimes. But really you should buy the whole head of broccoli and think about it as a two-for-one: You are getting two very different vegetables that just happen to be attached to each other.

Another good thing about the broccoli stalks is that they are very good for you. Typically, the darker a vegetable is, more healthful it is, so you might assume that the dark florets have vacuumed all the good stuff out of the pale stalks, but you would be wrong. Weirdly enough, pound for pound, the stalks have exactly the same nutritional profile as the florets. That means the stalks are high in calcium, iron, Vitamin A, potassium, and magnesium, and are even pretty high in protein for a vegetable. It probably has anti-cancer properties. The stalk is not food waste!

A typical head of broccoli has maybe six or so inches of stalk under the head of florets. To prepare the stalk, first chop off the florets as close to the buds themselves as possible; they have different cooking requirements than the stalks, so you want to isolate the stalk from the floret. On the base end of the broccoli, opposite the florets, chop off maybe an inch of the stalk — chances are, it’s dried out a bit in transit from the farm, and might even be a little bit tough. Now you’re left with a knobbly bit of stalk, probably with leaves and odds and ends sticking out from it. The leaves are edible and actually pretty tasty, but are much more tender than the stalk, so slice off the leaves and use them in some other way. (Cooked low and slow like kale, maybe? Or pesto?)

From here, some people will tell you that the outer skin of the stalk is tough and should be peeled. These people are probably French or at least French-inspired, accustomed to only the tenderest, most uniform pieces of food. This is unnecessarily finicky. I rarely peel the stalk; the toughness varies from broccoli to broccoli, but the only time you really need to peel it is if you’ve got a very tough specimen indeed and you’re planning on eating it raw. If roasting or pureeing or sauteeing? Don’t bother. If eating raw, give it a bite: if it’s rubbery and not that pleasant to eat, then you should peel it.

Stir-Fried Broccoli Stalk With Shirataki Noodles

Shopping list: Broccoli, garlic, ginger, scallions, rice wine vinegar, chili paste (like sambal oelek or sriracha), peanut oil (olive is not ideal but will work), mirin, soy sauce, brown sugar, nuts (peanuts, cashews, walnuts, or pecans will all work), shirataki noodles

Shirataki noodles are odd Japanese noodles that are made of, like, yam starch and sometimes tofu and who knows what else. They’re sold in individual bags packed in water and are typically found in the tofu aisle. The packaging usually presents them as low-carb, low-calorie healthy replacements for pasta; they are not this at all, as Serious Eats will tell you. The ones I get come in shapes inspired by pasta, like “angel hair” and “spaghetti” and “macaroni,” which is sort of bizarre. The wider, flat ones, which for me are branded as “linguine,” are the ones to get here. To prepare them, open and pour the whole bag into a strainer. Rinse with water. That’s it, they’re done now.

Put a stainless steel wok on low heat with about a tablespoon of oil to heat up. Chop maybe four cloves of garlic and three scallions, along with a thumb-sized knob of ginger if fresh (if frozen, grate with a microplane but save it for a second). Toss garlic and scallions and maybe ginger into the wok, along with a little bit of chili paste, and cook until the white part of the scallions are translucent.

Get two heads of broccoli. Slice off the broccoli florets and put them in a ziploc bag for another day. Slice off the tough end of the stalks, then slice the stalks lengthwise into halves. Now slice them widthwise into bite-sized pieces; do it on an angle (“on the bias,” a shithead chef would say) for a more restaurant-y look, if you want. Crank the heat under the wok as high as it’ll go and throw in the stalks, as well as a handful of nuts. Stir-fry for a couple minutes.

Mix up your sauce: about a tablespoon of soy, tablespoon of vinegar, half-tablespoon of mirin, couple teaspoons of brown sugar. Mix and taste: too salty? Add more mirin and sugar. Too sweet? Add more soy and vinegar. If you’ve used frozen ginger, add it to the sauce here. When it tastes good, throw it into the wok, stir around, and let it reduce for a couple minutes.

When the sauce has reduced so that you can’t really see too much liquid sloshing around in there, throw in the noodles and stir-fry them to get the sauce to coat them. Serve in bowl.

Shaved Broccoli Stalk Salad With Lemon Vinaigrette

Shopping list: Broccoli, lemon, mustard, honey, pine nuts, pecorino cheese, fresh basil, olive oil, shallots

Squeeze the juice of one lemon into a glass, and add a finely minced shallot to it. (If you have pickled onions or pickled shallots, very good work, skip the shallot and just squeeze a lemon.) Let it sit while you make the rest of this.

Put pine nuts (alternately: pecans, walnuts, pistachios, or hazelnuts) on a dry cast iron pan and toast until golden brown and fragrant. Be careful not to burn them.

Separate broccoli florets and save for another use. Getting to the stalk! This is one of the few instances where you might need to shave off the outer skin, so if your broccoli’s skin is tough, do that. Then, using a mandoline, shave into very thin strips. Be careful not to mangle your hand on the mandoline. Also shave some pecorino. Go back to the glass of lemon juice. Add in a small squirt of mustard and a small squirt of honey, and then add maybe half as much olive oil as lemon juice. Mix thoroughly. Slice the basil into chiffonade: stack leaves on top of each other, roll them up tightly like you’re rolling a sleeping bag, and slice width-wise as thinly as you can into ribbons.

Arrange the shaved broccoli stalk nicely on a plate. Scatter some nuts on top, then some cheese. Pour the dressing all over and around the salad, and top with the basil, along with salt and black pepper.

Roasted Stalks With Avocado And Lime

Shopping list: Broccoli, olive oil, garlic, yellow onion, avocado, limes, cotija or feta cheese, fresh cilantro, cumin

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Separate florets from stalk and discard the tough lower end of the stalk, then slice the stalk into discs, about a third of an inch thick. Peel an onion and slice half of it into half-moons. Peel and roughly chop about five cloves of garlic. Toss broccoli, garlic, and onion in a big bowl with maybe an eighth of a cup of olive oil and a few pinches of cumin. Spread evenly on a baking sheet and roast for about twenty minutes, until lightly caramelized on the bottom and tender, but not burnt. Take out of the oven and add salt.

Top with chopped avocado and crumbled cotija or feta. Squeeze lime all over and around, and top with some cilantro leaves.

We may not be able to eat the tender young shoots of the warming season to come quite yet; it’ll be another few weeks before the farmers markets have actual farmed spring crops. But the neglected, sometimes outright ignored broccoli stalk can actually soothe your hunger for crisp, juicy, mildly sweet vegetables. It is, I swear, at least as good as the florets, and maybe even more versatile. Eat the stalks!

Photo by Liz West

Awl pal Lizzie Skurnick’s That Should Be a Word: A Language Lover’s Guide to Choregasms, Povertunity, Brattling, and 250 Other Much-Needed Terms for the Modern World is out today, and it’s currently the #1 new release in Amazon’s Linguistics Reference section! Suck it, Fowler! Anyway, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life or spend your money or whatever but this book makes a great graduation gift for someone whom you don’t know that well and don’t want to drop a ton of cash on but do need to get a present for, so you can totally check that off your list. Also you personally will find it amusing, and there is so little left to laugh about that you’d be dumb to turn any opportunity away, so get two. Support your Awl pals! Buy this book! Etc!

★★★★ The coats — it had been just cold enough to require the coats — made a thick heap in the corner of the pew, leaving scant room to sit. What had been a cloudless sky was intermittently veiled as the children scurried after the eggs. When the eggs were gone, the three-year-old turned his residual excitement to leaping from the top of the churchyard’s retaining wall, a drop roughly equal to his full height. The clouds thickened into gray edged with white thistledown; the afternoon darkened. Now and again there were glory rays angling down from them, or a wash of sunlight through the all-glass corner of the glass apartment tower, or tangled streaks of gold between clouds. For a while the river sparkled blindingly downstream, and for a different while upstream lay flat and bright. The three-year-old went out with his scooter and came back with a sweaty head and a bumped elbow.

13. Snake
12. Cat
11. Vulture
10. Rabbit
9. Pig
8. Human
7. Dog
6. Wolf
5. Tiger
4. Eagle
3. Lion
2. Shark
1. (Komodo) Dragon

Photo by Ed Schipul

An Asshole Theory of Prestige TV

Emily Nussbaum’s TV writing stands out especially for its ambivalence about the purpose of TV writing:

A show doesn’t need to be perfect to have a powerful allure for viewers who just want to hang out in the world it invokes. (I’ve watched every episode of “Nashville.”) But TV is triage these days. While it used to be possible to catch up with every ambitious drama — during that golden era of TV efficiency, when there were only five of them — that’s no longer true. At this year’s Television Critics Association meetings, FX’s C.E.O., John Landgraf, a prolific producer himself, presented a report that was highly alarming, at least to television critics. Last year, according to FX’s data, three hundred and fifty-two scripted first-run prime-time and late-night programs aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming networks in the U.S., not including PBS. Joe Adalian, crunching the stats at New York’s Vulture, wrote that the number of new prime-time scripted cable shows had “doubled in just the past five years, tripled since 2007 (the year Mad Men premiered), and grown a staggering 683 percent since the turn of the century.” When people angrily tweet at me that some show is the best thing on TV, I know they’re lying: they haven’t watched most of the other ones, and neither have I.

She is absolutely right. TV is triage! A lot of media consumption is triage. There is no way for an honest viewer — or listener, or moviegoer — to feel caught up, and there is likewise no way for a critic to write as someone who does. This has been true for a few years now, and it’s had odd effects on criticism. Movie reviewing has been reduced, largely, to data production for Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Song and album reviews rarely precede the actual release of the music, so they’re treated as broad cultural writing prompts. Five or so years ago TV writing split into reviewing and recapping, which in the last couple years have merged into a strange hybrid, one which talks casually about what has happened, and which signals fandom along the way just enough to let the reader know that he has tastes in common with the writer (and that whatever recommendations might follow are worth hearing). People seem to want to read about why their favorite shows are good, or could be better, or aren’t as good as people say, as argued by someone more persuasive than themselves. This means lots of talking about things the viewer has already seen, and not much room for things they have not.

This can make reading about prestige drama itself feel like triage, or at least work. Which dysfunctional family do you want to eavesdrop on for eight to twelve hours? To which period of history do you want to apply modern anxieties?? How are we supposed to know which tragedy and which community deserves our tense but cathartic attention? Which middle-aged white antihero can we stand this year???

This will remain a problem until pop culture collapses into a billion personalized memes and shared media experience becomes inconceivable and people can review and read about “TV” and “movies” and “albums” like books, which is to say rarely. But that’s a few years off! Until then: what if we had a different way? What if we had a critical framework for prestige television that treats it as a genre (it absolutely is — and a specific one) instead of quality tier (a lot of it is bad)? An approach to not-fun-but-still-good television that acknowledges that it is mostly just about difficult people? And which calls them what they are? (They are assholes.)

This is not meant to be a simplification. There are many types of assholes. There are many types of representations of assholes. There are many degrees of quality and care in the representation of assholes; there are various intentions and inferences to be read into representations of assholes. There are assholes that remind you of yourself! There are assholes that remind you of people you know. There are assholes that speak to you, through their behavior as assholes, in such ways that enrich or clarify or pleasantly complicate your life.*

The quality of a show’s assholes might be the best clue we have as to its time-worthiness. Mad Men’s egregious assholes are, as time goes on, less interesting than they once seemed. The assholes of Togetherness are redeemable (not as people, but as watchable assholes) but why bother??? Better Call Saul is relitigating the motivations of assholes that viewers already know, which explains why it’s not sitting so well yet. True Detective’s disappointing assholes were all ass, no hole. Asshole Theory helps untangle feelings about a show like Nurse Jackie, which was full of things to dislike but which was absolutely compelling because it was centered around an extremely well-rendered and tragic asshole. Asshole Theory also helps explain the problem with CERTAIN OTHER Showtime shows, particularly the ones about families. They are shows populated with assholes of convenience — people who are assholes in a way that helps provide forward motion and script material, but that do not, and could not, exist anywhere outside of the Showtime-verse.

Asshole Theory has utility. Shows worth watching are full of the types of assholes that you know and are forced to tolerate, either by circumstances out of your control or personal weakness, and tell us more about them; shows worth skipping are populated with dime-a-dozen assholes dressed up as something more. A good, timeless asshole can buoy a series: Rectify is occasionally wonderful but also frustrating, and the presence and Teddy — an archetypal asshole the likes of which is rarely depicted accurately anywhere — makes it memorable. Asshole Theory helps us see straight past increasingly obvious PRESTIGE genre signifiers and into a show’s soul, which is actually located in its ass.

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that Bloodline, which may not seem like a great show at first, and which is over-the-top in its Prestige-ness, is worth watching for its excellent multigenerational ensemble of assholes. The best on TV right now, maybe! Not that I could possibly know.

*Update: Awl pal Johanna Johannah King-Slutzky points out: “I get the sense that “asshole” is demotic + supposed to be intuitive but for me it’s not.” This is true, so: assholes, here, are a subset of difficult people as narrowed (considerably) by Prestige TV genre conventions, which I realize are also not well-defined. They brood, they are explicitly concerned with power, they are often men and even more often older, and they are preoccupied with age. They belong to nuclear-ish families on the constant brink of cataclysm. What else?

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer and producer Andre Cole tells us more about the things dads do.

No idea why a skunk spray jelly bean exists nor why I played a game where I had to eat one, but good fathers do dumb things for their kids

 — @andrecole

Andre! So what happened here?

My teen daughter had a last-minute sleepover at our home with a couple of her close friends. If you are a parent to a teen girl, you know this means making sure dinner is available (usually ordering pizzas), then calling the other parents to assure them that their child is safe and that there is going to be an adult present in the house all night. The rest of the evening consists of noise erupting from your child’s bedroom: music, giggles, Oh EM Gees, text that, Snapchat this, he’s so cute, he’s such a dork, I really hate history class, etc. Until, of course, it gets late and you have to tell them to quiet down.

I usually don’t have to do the last part. I say my daughter’s name, she peaks her head out, sees my stern face, sighs, then goes back to tell her friends the hammer has been dropped.

I’m the serious parent. My wife is the fun, confident, “Hey girls, let’s MAKE pizza!” kind of lady. According to my daughter, her friends think I’m “cool, but intimidating and scary.” I’ll take that. Usually I get hellos, short waves and salutations, not much else.

In the morning, my wife makes them pancakes — from scratch. I tell them to clean up their mess. They hide out in the room for hours until parents start calling to end the fun. This time, things lingered later into the afternoon. I was in my dungeon (aka home office) rewriting a draft when I heard a burst of laughter from two stories up. Then there was the sound of feet rumbling down, down, and then . . . quietly tip-toeing. And there they were. My daughter looked uncertain, and her two friends had nervous smiles.

“Dad, you want to play this game?” my daughter said, presenting a small spinning wheel and a bowl of jelly beans.

“What is this?”

“You spin the wheel and eat whichever jelly bean it says,” one of her friends said.

“Let me guess, they’re all sour.”

“They all taste different,” the other friend said.

My daughter’s eyes pleaded: “Please be a good sport. Don’t be serious parent. Be cool, Dad.”

“Ok.” I spun the plastic wheel. It landed on “Lemon or Popcorn?”

“Wait, it didn’t go all the way around,” my daughter said. “Try again.”

The fix was in.

I spun. It landed on . . .

“Licorice or Skunk Spray?”

They giggled as my daughter fished a black jelly bean from the bowl.

“I don’t like Licorice.”

Suddenly my daughter had her phone pointed at my face recording me as I popped the jelly bean in my mouth. I considered swallowing it whole. But a cool dad wouldn’t do that. So I chewed. Immediately it was as if a skunk had sprayed directly into my esophagus. The stench overcame my taste buds. I don’t know the science behind it, but the taste was like biting a skunk spray gland and it erupting into your mouth.

“What is it?” my daughter asked.

“Skunk spray,” I said. The video evidence confirms my face tensed, and serious dad returned as soon as the flavor hit. They laughed. I smiled and shook my head. “That was disgusting.”

“Ewww, I smell it!” one of her friends said.

“I’m putting this on Snapchat!” my daughter yelled as they run back upstairs.

The serious dad and good sport will do whatever to make his daughter’s day (and Snapchat feed).

Your tweet implies that these sorts of scenarios are fairly common. What are some other “dumb things” that you’ve done for your kids over the years?

I’ve done it all. I hate playing board games. So, of course, my daughters love to play board games. Every other night it’s, “Can we play [horrible, horrible] board game tonight?” Then: Of course we can, sweetie. I’ve danced square dance at the school Square Dance Hoedown. Yes, me, the brooding hip-hop guy with long locs, danced to fiddles and do-si-doed with my little daughter as my partner, all for the smiles. The other parents got a kick out of snapping pictures of me. I’ve stood out in the pouring rain to watch one of my daughters play softball all because the umpire thought it built character for the girls. Meanwhile, I’m soaked and my character was built decades ago. A while back, my daughter wanted to attend a Girl Scout outing at a special campsite. At the time, it was “the most important scout event ever.” The event was making S’mores, singing songs, and riding in a canoe with dad. Total time of the event was an hour and a half. Total time I spent driving to and from the campsite: five hours.

This past week, I got two especially relevant texts from my teen daughter. One was asking if I was coming to her softball game since I was home at the time. (It was freezing out there.) The other asked if we could take her to see Lana Del Rey in Atlantic City during her birthday weekend. Just the other day, I was at my little daughter’s kindergarten chick-hatching party, where we got to see the birds hatch and get put in the warming station. It truly never ends.

Lesson learned (if any)?

If you want to build a memorable life for your kids, do things they want to do. You may have experienced tons, but the world is brand new to them, and being part of their fun makes lasting memories.

Just one more thing.

When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to see Superman 3 in the theater. My father did not. He took me anyway, hoping Richard Pryor would make it interesting for him. As you know, the movie was terrible. It was so terrible that my father hasn’t seen a film in a theater in the 32 years since. Hopefully I’ll get him to go with me to see a movie soon. I owe him. What I remember most was sitting in the seat, and then him handing me a bucket of popcorn and saying, “Ok, let’s see what Superman got for us!” The movie is long forgotten, but the memory will last forever.

Image by Kristine Paulus