The Silly Season

Christmas eve




Now that office parties are over.

All the shopping done [except for the nephews-in- law that you had forgotten were born in the last 10 years] , the fridges all sorted and stacked,



The pre-prep complete? menus in draft?

















Mud Crab and a salad?




















Time to open this years New Yorker food edition











The great thing about this magazine is that its not all food. We can drool over what's probably at half-tix On and Off Broadway, check the latest pithy barbs and bows featured in the Tables for Two column, where Nick Paumgarten [No relation to Stiengarten] in less than 300 words amuses you to audible chuckles and gets you thinking that it really might be worth a visit?



But then you remember that the company jet has been grounded due to lack of carbon credits.






You pour another glass and keep reading.




Check out the book reviews in Briefly Noted, where the first sighting of the Elephant in the Spanish Restaurant has been glimpsed in a "respectable" journal.

We all have a pattern in reading papers or mags, but the New Yorker is tough, you want to read it all in one session.
So pick a feature and settle back. Most of the main stories are good for a whole bottle and should keep us going for January.

I do the cartoons first.











Santa could you please remind the food editors all over the planet that cartoons and food stories go really well together. Some of them have forgotten it>