While the soup simmers, you could bake a not-too-sweet cornbread to serve alongside, or a sweeter, moist-centered pumpkin bread (which is really cake, who are we kidding?). Or these savory four-cheese flatbreads, which come together quickly using premade naan, flatbread or pita. The recipe calls for corn kernels (fresh, or frozen and thawed), but you can leave them out. A drizzle of hot honey on top wouldn’t hurt.
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Now, I’ve had a longtime affection for the musician Jonathan Richman and got to see him perform again last week in Williamsburg. His radical positivity really hits the spot right now, because he doesn’t dodge the sticky parts. On his latest EP, “Cold Pizza & Other Hot Stuff,” he sings about that moment when the party has to end: “Cold pizza, and a Coke with no fizz; it’s neither bad nor good, just sort of is what it is.”
For teenagers all over the world, the party came to a full stop in the spring semester of 2020. My colleague Katherine Schulten, in conjunction with The Learning Network of The New York Times, has documented this in “Coming of Age in 2020,” a heart-wrenching, funny book of stories, musings, photography and art by high school students all over the country about how they made it through that year. “Instead of proms and championship games and all-night hangouts with friends,” Katherine writes, all they got was “school on Zoom from bed.”
While the world outside their bedrooms loudly turned upside down, teenagers recorded their frustrations, despair, boredom and anxiety — but also plenty of humor, breathtaking insight and resilient seeds of hope.
