A Recipe for Happiness

It feels a bit pretentious to call this combination of three uncooked ingredients a recipe, but if there can be entire cookbooks devoted to salads (and there are!), then this simple concoction can bear up under the weight of being called a recipe.

• Trader Joe's Old Fashioned Cinnamon Grahams. I grew up with Nabisco's cinnamon grahams as the rarest and most satisfying of pleasures, but after trying Trader Joe's there's no going back. Crispier texture and a more pronounced cinnamon flavor.

• Peanut butter. Your call on this one, though I'm a smooth and creamy Jif man myself. Spread some pb on a graham cracker.

• Dark chocolate. Again, I'm a fan of the Trader Joe's bars from Belgium on sale in the check-out aisles. Three delicious bars for under $2: you can't go too far wrong. Put one little rectangle of chocolate on each half of the cracker.

Eat. Repeat. You won't be sorry. Simple and delicious. I've had them for breakfast, snacktime, and dessert, and I can't see laying off them anytime soon.

Line of the (So-Called) Week

"At the height of the battle, when it might have gone either way, the cool Taylor turned to his artillery officer and said, 'A little more grape, Captain Bragg.' Remarks like that were embedded in my head and took up precious space that should have been occupied with other things but wasn't."

—Charles Portis, from The Dog of the South

Saint Paul, Sidewalks, Poetry

Need I say more? Well, here's a link to a public tv episode that aired last week that does say a little bit more. Note the very green trees in it, a welcome reminder of other seasons on this gray and icy morning with no one out and about. It's eerily quiet. No traffic. No pedestrians. No dogs.

Faulkner

Pyromaniacs,

fecund summers,

sentences longer than trains.

—Found poem taken verbatim from a conversation with C. Oliver, 11/9/10