10 Things: Bees, Murder, Death

All my recommendations for what to ponder, read, listen to, consider, cook, and bookmark this week.

Hello Hello!

An ominous subject line for what will be an innocuous post, I think. But if it bleeds it leads, doesn’t it? The first three are for everyone; below the paywall you can find out how I met Bess Kalb on a roof in Brooklyn 20 years ago, and find out what I’ve been reading.

1. APPRECIATE: Bees

   

   Hi ladies! (And one male. I see one drone in this picture.)

Our bees have arrived. It bothers my husband how much the bees can stress me out, but I don’t think he fully appreciates how much they also bring me joy. As they’re getting settled into their hive, they’re having to move a lot of their dead, and I spent some time watching “undertaker bees” carry the bee corpses into piles of leaves and then tenderly bury them under the leaves. It’s in the upper 60s outside today (Hallelujah) so they are going to do this all day.

Every year, I get more comfortable letting the bees land on me and crawl along my skin; it feels more like saying hi to a friendly cat than it used to. Last year, my daughter, husband and I each got stung by the same black carpenter bee, who was mad at us for living in her nest. (It’s also, you know, our house. But I have a kid and I get it.) I’m sad because the honey bees are almost definitely not going to hurt my daughter, but she is still frightened of them. Nevertheless, this morning she said, “I feel scared of the bees, but I love them. I love you bees!” And this feels like a terrific starting place for any of us who have been traumatized by a yellow jacket or something. If you see a bee this week, say, “I love you!’

2. LEARN FROM: This NYT info-scrolly-thing about coot nests

Someone at the New York Times interviewed a scientist who is fascinated with the nests of coots in Amsterdam. Coots are an iconic waterfowl, and they use human trash to make their nests, which is kind of horrifying and kind of nice. The scientist collected old coots’ nests and extracted and catalogued all the trash, finding some that dated back 30 years. The graphic design on this is brilliant. I get that this is supposed to be a terrifying call to climate action, and that it should tell us something shocking about how permanent our waste is (AND IT IS AND IT DOES), but I mostly really enjoyed looking at the old trash and appreciating that coots take what they can to make beautiful babies. Hooray for coots. (Boo for humans. But hooray for coots!)

3. COOK: Big Vegan Flavor by Nisha Vora

A lot of the vegan recipes I pass along to people are by Nisha Vora. She has an accessible and straightforward vegan recipe blog called “Rainbow Plant Life,” and her post about 20-minute high-protein vegan meals is a straight-up banger. Her cookbook is more enormous than any I’ve bought in the past long while, and it comes in three parts: “Mastering Vegan Cooking,” which is about the basics of cooking with whatever you’ve got on hand, and reads a little more like a how-to guide; “The Building Block Recipes,” which has sauces, proteins, grains, and veggies that you can mix-and-match; and “Wow-Worthy Meals,” which features main event recipes. If you’re looking for a good cookbook for your next cookbook club, this is what I’d recommend!

• If you want a good starter dinner recipe, this one for lentil bolognese was a hit at our house. Our friend Leonard (not really named Leonard) was over for dinner and asked for the recipe.

• A cookbook club, which I learned from longtime reader

  Louisa R-D
  , is where you and a bunch of friends all get one cookbook, and then each person picks a recipe to make, and then you meet up and try all the recipes at once. A literally perfect idea.