Sing Along Snacks: Chicken Soup With Rice

It's never too early or too late for a snack, so crank up that volume on your computer.

Carole King sings of the joys of Chicken Soup with Rice to a Maurice Sendak animation. What's not to love?

"In January it's so nice

While slipping on the sliding ice

To sip hot chicken soup with rice

Sipping once, sipping twice

Sipping chicken soup with rice"

Uploaded by yonnco on 2012-10-17.

Friday Faves — notes from the new gastroconomy, No. 28

a weekly round-up of our favorite finds from the front lines of food

• Thank you Maurice Sendak for childhood treasures and inspirations like In The Night Kitchen (above).

• "Imagine you are in a bar or at a friend's place, and you want to sabre a bottle of champagne but, tragically, there is no sabre at hand. Fear not..." So reads The Art of Champagne, Artfully Illustrated, in a style that put us in the mind of What do You Say Dear?, the volume of manners (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) which tackles such social conundrums as "You are downtown and there is a gentleman giving baby elephants to people. You want to take one home because you have always wanted a baby elephant, but firs the gentleman introduces you to each other. What do you say, dear?"

• And now for something completely different, Crazy Orange Camo Lobster Caught Off the Coast of Maine. His crazy looked earned him a place at the New England Aquarium instead of in a Pepperidge Farm roll with a touch of mayo.

• In a New York Times OpED Pitting Child Safety Against the Family Farm, Marjorie Elizabeth Wood takes on the red herring that legislation intended to protect farmworkers will really destroy the family farm."The same commercial forces that thwarted the Child Labor Amendment in the 1920s continue to stymie reform today. In an age when Big Agriculture still benefits from the laxity of our child labor laws, the reformers’ legacy is one we would do well to reclaim."

In The Night Kitchen — thank you Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak's book In The Night Kitchen was one of my earliest cooking inspirations.

In my mother and grandmother's kitchens, flour and milk could be made into a hundred wonderful things, and there was always something new to try. The book confirmed it — baking was magic.

The night kitchen Maurice Sendak drew stuck with me. It was another world — mysterious, a little dangerous, and filled with strange characters — which is exactly how I found the kitchen when I first started cooking professionally.

"I'm not the milk, and the milk's not me," shouted Mickey before he built his dough airplane and flew into the sky to fetch milk for the cake.

Maurice Sendak sparked the idea that creation and adventure lies within every raw ingredient and every blank page. Every day I sit down to write or open my cabinets looking for something to play with, I find again how true that it.

To quote another of his books, "Let the wild rumpus start!"

Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83. (New York Times)