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Food Wednesday

"In springtime, New York City is a little like Tokyo," she said looking around Rockefeller Center. "But without the fresh bamboo shoots." More
Recipe: Scallops With Miso-Mustard Cream Sauce
Recipe: Soy-Deviled Eggs With Watercress and Salmon Roe
Recipe: Warm Eggplant Salad With Sesame and Shallots

Artichokes: Beneath a Prickly Exterior, a Welcome Taste of Spring Article
Recipe: Baby Artichokes and Shrimp
Recipe: Shaved Artichoke Salad
Recipe: Stuffed Artichokes

When in Doubt, Add an Egg, Japanese Style
Recipe: Asparagus With Miso Butter
Recipe: Grits and Shrimp

Worst President Ever?

Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

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