zz -- top 3 emailed articles in NYTimes, Feb 18, 2009

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Your Morning Pizza

THERE are many reasons to rethink breakfast.

Maybe you’re trying to get more whole grains into your life, figuring they’re more beneficial (and cheaper) than the alternatives, or that they’ll help you lose weight or postpone hunger. Or you’re sick of sweet breakfasts. Trying to cut down on eggs. Looking for something new.

All of those were reasons for me when, a year or two ago, I started eating things at breakfast that you would more likely associate with dinner: black olives, quinoa, miso, dried tomatoes, sesame oil, bok choy, wheat berries, roasted carrots.

The foundation of most of these breakfasts has been whole grains, and making them a morning staple has done me nothing but good. I’m eating more of them, I’ve lost weight, the morning meal “lasts” longer before I’m hungry again.

The differences between the ways our bodies handle whole and highly processed grains may be arguable, but surely it would be foolhardy to pretend that a stack of doughnuts or a bowl of Sugar Pops is the nutritional equivalent of a bowl of bulgur or cooked oats.

But even putting aside the health argument, the narrow spectrum of highly sweetened morning food is limiting and ultimately boring.

At first glance, the savory options may seem just as limited. But everybody eats savory breakfasts at least occasionally, from bacon and eggs to bagels and lox, dim sum and the breakfast burrito. And, dare I say it, the Egg McMuffin. Then there are dinner leftovers — like cold pizza — and the occasional brunch dish.

Once I started looking around, in fact, I didn’t feel limited at all. It could be that my breakfast preferences stem from my mother, who served oatmeal and cream of wheat with nothing more than butter and salt — no brown sugar, no maple syrup. I thought this was the only way to go until I got out into the world a little and found out how unusual her approach was.

Or it could be that I’ve traveled enough to learn the joys of jook, the Chinese rice porridge also known as congee, which is among my favorite ways to start the day even when seasoned with nothing more than scallions, soy and chopped peanuts; of the kipper, baked beans, broiled mushrooms, tomatoes and other staples of the traditional English breakfast; of cucumbers, feta and olives, which I ate daily in Turkey; of ful medames, the lemon-kissed fava concoction of Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East; and, one glorious day about 10 years ago, of kao tom, the Thai version of jook, loaded with sausage, eggs and nam pla.

Everything is fair game at breakfast — and long has been, of course — but to most Americans it doesn’t seem appropriate to start making what amounts to dinner at seven in the morning. It’s one thing to eat leftover pizza, pasta, roast chicken, soup, whatever; it’s entirely another to start cooking them while your tea or coffee is still brewing.

It does feel natural, however, to see grains as the basis for a savory breakfast. Grains are the foundation of many traditional breakfasts, like cereal, toast and porridge; they can be fast or prepared in advance (more on this in a moment), they require little or no attention, and they’re satisfying. Their flavor is also neutral enough to be the starting point for a host of dishes that can be as simple as oatmeal with scallions and soy (or olive oil and tapenade, or chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, or miso and seaweed), or as complex as polenta “pizza” with greens and pancetta, an unusual and spectacular weekend breakfast dish.

About speed and the rushed-morning syndrome: I have long maintained that instant or even “quick” oatmeal is a hoax, given that rolled oats require only a few minutes to make, that even steel-cut oats can be cooked pretty quickly, and that any grain can be made “instant” by grinding it a bit finer in a good blender or food processor. There are other tricks that make whole grains faster (pre-cook halfway, soak overnight or use a pressure cooker, for example), but in the last few years I realized that even these aren’t crucial.

That’s because any whole grain can be cooked ahead of time in any quantity. The easiest technique is simply to boil a couple of cups of grains as you would pasta, in abundant water, until done and then refrigerate. If, as happens with finely ground grains, the cooked grain sets up in the refrigerator (often desirable, in the case of polenta), you just whisk in a little water before reheating, which you can do on top of the stove or in the microwave.

Uncovering this little-known fact has made the savory, grain-based breakfast a matter of routine for me. I do polenta with butter and Parmesan; steel-cut oats with peanut butter (sometimes with hot sauce); and, a recent favorite, brown rice with dried mushrooms and dried tomatoes.

In addition to the polenta “pizza,” and the wheat berry-soy-scallions bowl, which I eat in one variation or another at least once a week, you might consider this coconut oat pilaf, a spicy, aromatic dish that will change the way you think about oatmeal. As for the wild rice and quinoa dish, a kind of stuffing for breakfast, this — like the traditional post-Thanksgiving meal — is a perfect place for leftovers. As is breakfast in general.

Here are a few more fast ideas for savory, mostly whole-grain breakfasts (some of which come from readers of my blog, Bitten — for these I say a general “thanks”):

Breakfast risotto I can’t think of a leftover risotto I wouldn’t love at breakfast. But if you’re starting from scratch, fry sausage or pancetta in a little oil; add dried tomatoes, garlic, and onion, then rice. Make the risotto. Finish with cheese, parsley or sage, lemon juice.

Congee Best in a slow cooker. Use about one cup rice to six cups liquid — stock mixed with water, or all water. Cook with a little salt, maybe a bit of meat, until very soft and soupy. Top with dried or cooked shrimp, scallions, cilantro, bean sprouts, chopped peanuts, soy. You can use brown rice, too.

Saffron chickpeas Cook chickpeas in abundant water with garlic and a pinch of saffron; when they’re almost done, add salt and chorizo, along with a bit of pimentón if you like. Serve over barley, polenta, rice or flatbread. Other chickpea breakfasts: falafel, hummus.

Whole wheat flatbread With Parmesan or olive oil and rosemary.

Migas Essentially stir-fried bread: Take 1/2-inch pieces of good whole wheat or rye and cook it in (lots of) olive oil with garlic, crumbled chorizo, or whatever else you like, until the bread is crisp.

Stir-fry Any one you like. I do bok choy with tofu frequently, over whatever cooked grain I have around.

The sandwich Whole wheat bread, avocado, tomato. Mayo is optional; lemon juice is also good.

Grits or polenta A godsend with Parmesan or other cheese, lots of black pepper, maybe a bit of butter. Or with shrimp sautéed in butter. Or baked, as in the polenta pizza recipe, but with eggs in place of the greens or tomatoes and mozzarella. Or with eggs and greens, especially kale.

Vaguely Japanese Bake leftover brown rice with eggs; drizzle with sesame oil and soy sauce, garnish with toasted nori.

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Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory.

“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying, “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

At Vanderbilt, there is an emphasis on what Dean Hogge calls “the locus of control.” The goal is to put the academic burden on the student.
“Instead of getting an A, they make an A,” he said. “Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher’s fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”

Additionally, Dean Hogge said, “professors often try to outline the ‘rules of the game’ in their syllabi,” in an effort to curb haggling over grades.
Professor Brower said professors at Wisconsin emphasized that students must “read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas.”

This informal mission statement, along with special seminars for freshmen, is intended to help “re-teach students about what education is.”
The seminars are integrated into introductory courses. Examples include the conventional, like a global-warming seminar, and the more obscure, like physics in religion.

The seminars “are meant to help students think differently about their classes and connect them to real life,” Professor Brower said.

He said that if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

“College students want to be part of a different and better world, but they don’t know how,” he said. “Unless teachers are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in place.”

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I was dubious about Will Ferrell doing his Bush impersonation one more time on Broadway.

As we lurch through the disasters bequeathed by W. — the economy tanking, 17,000 more troops going to Afghanistan, Chrysler pleading for a total of $9 billion — would audiences still laugh at Ferrell’s lovable fool of a president?

I was wrong. The audience for the Sunday matinee of “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush” howled in delight.

I asked Adam McKay, the former head writer of “Saturday Night Live” who directed and co-wrote the show with Ferrell, why people respond this way to one of the worst presidents ever.

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,” McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie” who was “just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

“He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld.”

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

“He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just ran.”

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

There were clues in the last couple of years that W. and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by cutting loose Rummy.

As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The New York Daily News’s Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration: “It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard the president say, ‘Run that by the vice president’s office.’ You used to hear that all the time.”

The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as “Cheney’s Cheney,” despite Vice’s tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too late “You are not the boss of me” spurning of Dick Cheney.

It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all the other gigantic blots on the copybook.

As DeFrank reported in The Daily News, Cheney conducted a full-bore, last-ditch campaign to persuade W. to pardon Libby, peppering the reluctant president with visits and phone calls, and was furious when W. would not relent.

After so many years of getting W. to do so much of what he wanted, by giving the insecure president the illusion of deference and a lack of personal ambition, it must have been infuriating to Cheney to have W. turn a deaf ear.

Cheney, uncharacteristically critical of W., told The Weekly Standard last month: “I disagree with President Bush’s decision.” Other Libby sympathizers put it more bluntly in the conservative magazine, calling Bush “dishonorable” and saying that his action was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield.

Alan Simpson, the former conservative Wyoming senator who is close to Cheney, told Jo Becker and Jim Rutenberg of The Times that the decision had left the former vice president “hurt and deeply disappointed,” but he is not the type to stay bitter. (With Cheney contemplating writing a book, publishers and historians can only hope otherwise.)

By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.

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and making them a morning staple has done me nothing but good

It could be that my breakfast preferences stem from my mother,

Or it could be that I’ve traveled enough to learn the joys of jook, the Chinese rice porridge also known as congee, which is among my favorite ways to start the day even when seasoned with nothing more than scallions, soy and chopped peanuts;

Everything is fair game at breakfast — and long has been, of course — but to most Americans it doesn’t seem appropriate to start making what amounts to dinner at seven in the morning.

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if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C. That is the default grade.

“College students want to be part of a different and better world, but they don’t know how,” he said. “Unless teachers are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in place.”

事实上这句没看懂，谁能解释一下？偶发奖金的～