Author: Ben S. Pollock

Why write more when my home page
will distract you from the real me.

www.benpollock.com

E-mail me here: (written out to reduce spam) ben(at-sign)benpollock(dot)com

Bake

Beaver Town Inn Blue-Ribbon Muffins

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date January 13, 2023

My Beloved and I were in our early 40s, married almost 5 years in late 1997. We had grown weary of our string of jobs, finance-data-training for her, newspaper editing for me. Let’s buy a bed-and-breakfast, we dreamed. No, let’s run someone’s B&B first and see if we like the life, we chose. I answered […]

Main Courses

Just So Omelet

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date November 13, 2022

Moong dal omelet, with filling of sliced portobello mushrooms and diced onions

Just So Omelet is a story about eggs and flatbreads. Just So Stories was a collection for children by Rudyard Kipling. Rather than illuminate biology for children with facts, his were fanciful tales about, for example, how the elephant got its trunk. Here is a homemade version of Just Egg, the “plant-based scramble.” Just Eggs […]

Sides

Run a Tab on Tabbouleh

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date October 7, 2022

Two small bowls of tabbouleh — Leftover tabbouleh is fun for lunches later in the week.

It was in the afternoon break between Yom Kippur services the other day when my stomach growled for tabbouleh after sundown. I usually hit a market on the way home for items to donate to a shelter (my congregation traditionally collects these at the end of the Day of Atonement), so I also gathered the […]

Brick Bats Reportage

Three Cheers for NEA — Ra Ra RA

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date July 27, 2022

Ben Pollock of UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965 takes the minutes July 3, 2022, (left) of the morning Arkansas caucus meeting July 3, 2022, at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. At right, Pollock listens to debate July 4, 2022, at the NEA Representative Assembly at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention complex. Photos by Kyle Leyenberger, AEA communications director.

UA Takes Its First Seat at NEA Convention By Ben Pollock, Local 965 secretary This report first was published in the July 2022 newsletter of UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965. Lots of us this summer have had to consider both mass shootings and reproductive rights. I ended up diving headfirst into both over July […]

News, Spin

Hmm, Diddle Diddle

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date June 30, 2022

Illustration of "the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon" — "And the dish ran away with the spoon" Illustration by Randolph Caldecott, public domain

And the dish ran away with the spoon. From the nursery rhyme “Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis’d in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste.” John Milton, “Areopagitica” (quoted by Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club, June 2022) A few years ago […]

Bake

Just Enough Bagels

Post author By Ben S. Pollock
Post date May 11, 2022

Unsold bagels in the trash behind a bagel shop. Credit 'Chicago Storytelling' by DePaul University College of Communication / Wikimedia Commons

Sourdough, Whole-Wheat, No-Knead Recipe One goal in my first trip to New York City, organized by My Beloved, this past April, was a breakfast with fresh, real bagels. In Ess-a-Bagel, we believed we had merely picked a well-ranked shop in Yelp walkable from our hotel, but a couple of weeks later The New York Times […]