 all really easy to make and mum will love them, I promise. If I wasn’t going to
be watching my brother graduate from college on Mother’s Day, I’d absolutely whip these up for my mum. We’ll just have to recreate Mother’s Day a different day so she can experience the magic!
The first recipe I’m sharing with you is for my cinnamon & nutmeg French toast. Topped with fresh berries and powdered sugar, you’ll love it.
{The frittata recipe will be up tomorrow! Until then, try not to drool over your keyboard/tablet/phone ;)}
Ingredients
- 1 loaf French, brioche or challah bread, sliced 1/2-inch thick
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup half-and-half
- 2 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1 tbsp. butter
- Sliced strawberries (or any berry of your choosing)
- Powdered sugar, for dusting
Instructions
- Whisk.
1 CommentSixth Street and Naval Avenue, like many arterials in Bremerton’s central residential neighborhoods, are built to handle about double the capacity of cars that they actually see in a given day, and Bremerton is starting to claw back its streets for… you know… the people who actually live here.
“Bikelash” describes the bizarrely emotional, vitriolic reactions a certain type of person has toward anything other than car infrastructure. As the name implies, usually it’s directed toward bike lanes and cyclists -- but I’ve seen it sometimes directed toward sidewalks or even pedestrians in general. The simple truth is that options like pedestrian, bicycle, and bus infrastructure in urban areas are the future. Younger generations want those options, but I think it’s beneficial to decipher the emotional sources of bikelash.
Yes, I’m aware we aren’t Europe.
Yes, I know that it’s hard to get around without a car. That’s self-inflicted.
No, we’re not trying to tear up highways or abolish all roads everywhere or force people to give up cars, or any of the other misrepresentations I’ve heard. We need balance, and right now we’re out of balance.
No, we don’t need bike lanes everywhere. If bikes and cars can’t share the lane on a flat, 25-mph neighborhood street, something is wrong.
No, transit diversity doesn’t mean giving up cars entirely. It means different modes of transportation make sense for different types of trips. It means you drive because you want to, not because you have to.
Yes, many Americans love their cars -- but many don’t.
Two factors seem to dictate a person’s opinion on cars. One is whether they live in an urban setting.
People outside of central Poulsbo, Bremerton, Port Orchard, and Bainbridge seem to feel like the push for transit alternatives within those urban areas is some sinister attempt to force them into carless Soviet gulags, but that’s not what’s on the table. I understand complaints about the Growth Management Act. It can feel like the state is trying to forcibly urbanize everyone -- but by the same token, it can feel like cities are trying to forcibly suburbanize through exclusionary zoning, low density maximums, overly-specific land use zones, and parking minimums. It’s a contradiction, and something has to give. Duplexes, ADUs, and neighborhood businesses allow people to live densely and affordably; sidewalks and multimodal lanes allow people to move densely and affordably -- but I digress. Suffice it to say, urban and rural areas have different transit needs, and should look different.
City cores shouldn’t be subservient to passers-through. Cars are terrible neighbors, and for too long Bremerton has prioritized the cars of its visitors over the lives of its citizens. When I take my daughter to the park, there’s about a one in four chance some idiot will blow through the red light that protects pedestrians crossing Sixth Street near Our Lady Star of the Sea's school. It’s a picture of reckless entitlement that so many think their convenience and their timeline is more important than the life of the child who might have the gall to cross the street when the light gives them the all-clear.
I hear Kitsap’s brightest revving on 11th Street day and night, making their mark on the world in the most profound way they know how: by maxing out their Paul-Walker-to-Vin-Diesel ratios at a blazing 45 miles per hour in a 30. We get it.  Great. Now go away.  Pardon my emotion, but this is actual life-and-death at stake, not convenience. My sister’s close friend was hit and killed last week while jogging. 38,000 others are killed by traffic every year. It would be foolish to downplay this threat.
Second, there’s a stark generational divide.
Baby Boomers have positive emotional associations with the automobile, associations that are totally foreign to Millennials like me. For many Boomers cars symbolize freedom, convenience and sex appeal, which makes sense when you consider the historical movements of their time.
The Greatest Generation didn’t significantly deviate from traditional development models until well after the Federal Highway Administration was formed in 1966, so Baby Boomers’ childhood neighborhoods were still walkable. A 1959 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph captured the horror of traffic violence. It was a time when people still valued human life over convenience: Beaver Cleaver didn’t get bikelash. Boomers came of age when cars were the shiny new thing and getting your own meant freedom from your parents and a vehicle for courtship. Fixing cars was a symbol of self-sufficiency and grit. Boomers were born into the prosperity and excess of a new-wealth country, enjoying the freedom of the open road, bald eagles, and Bon Jovi.
I mean, who doesn’t like Bon Jovi? If I grew up in that era, I’d probably be polishing a 1939 Plymouth Suburban as we speak.
So Boomers built, assuming that the fashions of the '60s through the '90s were eternal. I-90 finally connected Seattle and Boston in 1991 after delays when residents of Wallace, Idaho, narrowly saved their historic downtown from being demolished for the freeway. Crazy! Why would anyone save some old buildings when you could have a big, new freeway in the middle of town?
Farms and forests were lost to sprawl. Shopping malls gutted downtown mom-and-pop stores. Black neighborhoods were demolished for highways in order to get more people to their satellite neighborhoods and big-box retailers, where redlining kept people of color out. “White Flight” sucked the established wealth out of inner cities, filling suburbs with bigger and bigger houses, yards, and cars. Bigger was always better, and quantity trumped quality.
Every generation rebels against the excesses that precede it. Boomers have to confront the fact that the fashions of their era were not timeless. Shopping malls are dying. New generations value experiences over possessions, seeking authenticity and community. Time has vindicated the people of Wallace. We’re chumps for those old main streets. We’ll happily spend billions to bury viaducts and highways so we can see some greenery instead of asphalt. And it’s not all roses: gentrification of the city center is the racial disruptor of our day. Gen Z has impressed me, and one day they will rebel against Millennial excesses -- and that gives me hope.
For most millenials, cars are like washing machines. They’re appliances. We need them. They’re useful. We like them when they’re practical, affordable, and reliable -- but they aren’t sexy, and study after study shows we're not enthusiastic about them, Gen Z even more so. Entering the workforce during the Great Recession forced us to do without many things, especially cars. It’s still hard for me to shake the mentality of learning to drive in the wake of 9/11, when Saudis flew planes into our buildings and going to the pump felt like writing a check to OPEC.
We grew up asking mom for a ride, constantly getting shuttled around, watching the world go by from the backseat, unable to have social lives without someone carting us out of suburban bubbles. Boomers associate cars with independence; we associate cars with coddling and infancy.
Millennials love to travel, and we’ve returned with legitimate questions. Why can't we be more like the rest of the world? It’s not just Europe impressing us with urban vitality, I’ve been impressed by Colombia and Turkey. Readers have written in about Chile and Korea. The world is simply better than us at making cities.
Millennials aren’t peeking over the picket fence to see what our peers have, we’re checking each other’s Instagram feeds to see what we’re doing, and that has serious implications for city planning. A yard is great, sure, but we value connection -- and that’s why my neighborhood in central Bremerton is filling with young professionals fixing up old houses and walking or biking to jobs, parks, and restaurants. It’s why home values are skyrocketing in walkable neighborhoods. It’s why Greg Wheeler was elected mayor on a platform of restoring the walkability our grandparents’ generation enjoyed