What’s the oddest beauty treatment you’ve tried?

It’s likely you’ve already heard about or tried Baby Foot Peel. The word-of-mouth for this weird, gross, but amazing foot treatment—that promises to rid you of all calluses and leave your feet as smooth as a baby’s—has been going strong for a few years now. I finally decided I had to try it. Here’s how that went and two other odd (if slightly less gross) processes I’ve suffered in the name of beauty…

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Leek and Mushroom Breakfast Tart with Salt-and-Pepper Crust

This thyme-enhanced recipe has all the earmarks of a favorite: cheese stuck to the page, flour dust from my hands, a few telling drips of browned butter. You can always spot the best loved dishes by the state of the recipe card. I shared this one with Nugget Markets for the holidays, and they were kind enough to include it in their newsletter.

We typically make the tart as a side dish at dinner—or even as a main, paired with a salad—but all that’s left to do is add some eggs and it’s wonderful for breakfast. In this case I’ve cooked them directly on top, but it might even be simpler to make a large pan of scrambled eggs to plate alongside this dish—a good idea for a bigger crowd.

A note on ingredients: The fillings are flexible. Make it work with what you have. Pull some greens from your dinner side-dishes if you prefer. Double up your pie dough recipe and set some aside. Or even pick up a pre-made crust. Do whatever you need to do to save yourself those extra moments in the morning. Also, if you do make the crust, consider making an extra—the pepper is so good with sweet fillings, too.

Farewell, Ursula K. Le Guin (& Friday Links)

As an undergraduate, I started out majoring in Biological Anthropology, but a seminar in Comparative Literature during my second year, taught by Sal Allosso, made me switch. I discovered how I loved looking at literature (and, in turn, ourselves) through so many different lenses—theoretical, multi-cultural, interdisciplinary, historical. It was during that class that I first read something by Ursula K. Le Guin, who died this week at the age of 88. The New Yorker describes her work: “Le Guin was the author of essays, poetry, and fiction, some of it science fiction or fantasy, some of it realist, much of it unclassifiable.” And it’s a testament to her broad appeal and beautiful writing (as well to that wonderful professor) that The Lathe of Heaven became one of my favorite books that year, as I am not what you would call the sci-fi or fantasy type.

In fact, Aron jokes that I mislead him. When we first met, I gave him a copy of the book as a gift, and he thought we might share more of a fondness for the genre than was the case.

What I enjoyed (and of course what most people do enjoy about science-fiction done well) was the way she questioned the status-quo. Her examinations of race and gender were inventive as well as subversive. I went back to find something that stood out in that novel and found this, about a society where everyone was made gray, underlined:

“She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.”― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

When I was growing up, the predominant feeling in education seemed to be that we should try to erase race, be colorblind—color consciousness would promote nativism and discrimination, so this felt especially provocative to me. Most sociologists now agree that “colorblindness comes at a cost. By claiming that [we] do not see race, [we] also can avert [our] eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on ‘soft skills’ in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for white peers.” (Adia Harvey Wingfield, for The Atlantic). Recognizing disparity and difference is actually what leads to a “willingness to work for change.” All of that was in the idea that in a gray world this woman could not exist.

I feel like I owe a debt to Le Guin for opening my eyes to a new genre and its power. And maybe for a new boyfriend?

NPR replayed a bit of an earlier interview Terry Gross conducted with Le Guin on Fresh Air and I really enjoyed hearing her thoughts on being a mother and a writer at once, too. It’s a 6-1/2 minute clip, if you’d like to listen.

Here are some more links  you may enjoy as well… 

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