I’ve discovered my new favorite shortbread. I saved this zebra-striped shortbread recipe from Bon Appétit years ago but had never made it, and was looking for a special cookie for my personal shopper and his boss, who loves shortbread most of all. It wasn’t exactly simple, but it was pretty easy, and so delicious.

You mix the dry ingredients in two bowls, just flour and salt in one, and swap out a third cup flour for cocoa powder in the other. Once you’ve beaten the butter, sugars, egg yolk, and vanilla you split that into two equal parts and then mix the vanilla batch first, then the chocolate batch. Then you layer them, roll them, and chill them.

Once chilled, you brush each log all over with egg (I just used the white from the yolk in the dough), roll them in sanding sugar, and slice (as evenly as possible). Then pop them in the oven. Even if I opt not to go through the zebra striping process again, leaving out the cocoa, I’m going to make the dough otherwise the same. It came out so tender but not crumbly, and so tasty.

Just one more word about corruption, from Ta-Nehisi Coates; and then, an antidote if you’ve got 17 more minutes. Check out this inspiring short film about the Ground Game, featuring key candidates in battleground states and their massive grassroots support from volunteers. I am enthusiastically but also cautiously hopeful about democrats taking back the House and Senate this midterm after watching it. Mainstream/legacy media simply have not covered the millions of Americans who’ve been fighting for democracy since the last election, since the scale of the Republican president’s moral turpitude and staggering corruption have smeared themselves through our lives, leaving us all with some degree of moral injury. There really is a ground game, and we are certainly winning that. We’ve got the numbers to flip some seats, if only enough people bother to vote!