“Tomorrow we’re going to make soup and bread,” my foreign friend informed me.
“We’ll cook in kilo!” I delighted.
“We’re making soup,” she pointed out, “we’re not using measurements.”
Month: April 2018
Recipe Revolt & Neiman Marcus Cookies
Recipes are meant as inspiration. You don’t like almond extract? Skip it. It calls for margarine? Halve it. You ran out of rosemary? Use oregano. At least, that’s how I interpret recipes. Except, sometimes, I want to make sure that the cookies I’m making are guaranteed to turn someone’s day around. At those desperate times, I need to make sure that the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookies – because those are the one thing that we can all agree make the world a better place – turn out the way that the general public thinks they should. So, I follow the actual recipe. And each time I follow a recipe, I am shocked by how well it turns out. It turns out that I’m not the only one. I recently learned that there’s a small but strident group that don’t follow recipes except for the rare occasion – rare occasions on which they’re inordinately pleased by the recipe-following results. However, while I simply can’t be bothered to follow a recipe, other people are taking a stand by refusing to be dictated to by a list of ingredients and instructions. So this recipe goes out to those who believe:
I have enough people telling me what to do. I’ll put as much baking soda in these as I want to, thank you very much.
Hear their rallying cry, and fear their wanton disregarding for your baking soda beliefs. But don’t worry about how the cookies will turn out; these ones are nearly error-proof.
Neiman Marcus Cookies
1/2 cup unsalted margarine
1 cup brown sugar
3 tsp granulated sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
dash of salt
1 3/4 cups flour
8 oz chocolate chips
Cream the margarine and sugars to a consistency of wet sand, then beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine all other dry ingredients, then add slowly to the creamed mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Shape/drop cookies on to cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or oiled foil. Bake at 375 F for 7-10 minutes.
Women in the Workplace: Negotiations – Not Just for Hostages Anymore
There’s trade-craft to salary negotiation. The key? Being willing to ask. That’s where many of people, including my sisters in the workplace, get stuck. When I have negotiated raises on someone else’s behalf, I start by pointing out all the ways in which that individual has improved our overall productivity, difficult projects in which they’ve been involved, and the number of cases they’ve closed. Having that information at my fingertips – having written my own evaluation – is great ammunition. So, start there for yourself. By the time you’re done, you’ll be convinced that this negotiation is best for you, and your employer. And if that helps you do a better job on your own behalf, all the more reason to negotiate.
Before you begin, review what you have, what you want, and why they should give it to you. You need to know: your current salary, and the median – not average – salary for professionals in your field in your city. What do you want? That’s up to you. But ask for more than you think they’ll be willing to give, and know what your acceptable range looks like. Most importantly, know why you and your employer will want to work on this together: they love you. They may not love you the way they love their grandma – or Lauren from HR with the candy bowl – but they love that you work there and they don’t currently need to train someone new to take your place. Before you begin any negotiation, remind yourself – so that you’re ready to remind your management – why they love employing you. For instance: your current workload, length or duration or flexibility of your work day, years of experience you bring, your adaptability – be it with different populations or subject matter -, ways in which you exceed expectations, and your reputation of excellence. They pay you; clearly you have made your expertise, abilities, and hard-working attitude clear. Don’t forget to also enumerate the reasons they don’t want to lose you: they’ve trained you, you know the drill, and they don’t need to continue training you. FYI: on average it takes 6 months to get a new employee functioning at full speed. They don’t need to do that with you.
In most cases, if the negotiation doesn’t go well, nothing happens. You asked, and they said no. But you’re still employed – go you! Meanwhile, it rarely hurts to remind your employer of how much they want to keep you and what they should be doing to make you happy.
Or, as a former New York Times editor says;
[Jill] Abramson was the first woman to hold the executive editor spot—arguably the pinnacle of American journalism. Sulzberger had offered it to her over the phone in 2011, and she didn’t think to ask at the time what her predecessors’ compensation had been. “My advice to younger women now is don’t do what I did,” she tells me. “Just be very straightforward and ask those questions. I was stupid not to.”
Novel Approach to Money in Politics
“Are you sorry you bet on me?” you ask. “I did warn you.”
“Never! I bet on people, and I particularly bet on smart women. This was your starter election – get your scandal out of the way. Now they know what happened, and they’re used to you. If we lose this one, we’ll run again. We’ll run for something bigger.”
“You’re crazy,” you say.
“Maybe I am. But I’ve got a bigger checkbook than anyone in this town. And the biggest checkbook wins.”
“This isn’t always true,” you say.
“Fine, but the biggest checkbook can always go the most rounds.”
– from Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin
there is on whom to rely 