Lydia Likes It

What goes with what?

Are you hooked on Connections? After a few months of beta testing, this terrific New York Times puzzle has passed the popularity test and been granted permanent game status alongside Spelling Bee and Wordle. Each day you'll find a grid of 16 words. The aim of the puzzle is to group the words by common themes. Sometimes they're foods, or professions, or locations, or activities, or music groups, or toys, or directions. The connections are occasionally obvious, more often tricky (the puzzle creators are fond of words with several meanings), and sometimes impossible to figure out, which makes this puzzle wickedly fun. Access through your New York Times subscription, or by clicking on the image above.

Cole slaw, and so much more

If the bag offered "shredded cabbage" in big letters on the front, would you buy it? Doesn't sound very sexy, I know, but that's exactly what you'll get in a bag of cole slaw mix from the supermarket, and it's one of my all-time favorite kitchen timesavers. A combination of green and purple cabbages plus carrots, cole slaw mix resides in the produce section of every grocery store. Add some mayonnaise, dill, Dijon mustard and rice vinegar to turn it into traditional cole slaw, or do what I do and throw it into stir fries with ground beef or turkey, onions, mushrooms, and seasonings like soy sauce, Sriracha or Japanese BBQ sauce. Substitute cole slaw mix cup-for-cup in any recipe that calls for shredded cabbage. How about tofu stir-fry with cabbage and cashews, or nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice), or stir-fried beef and cabbage with spicy peanut sauce? Cabbage contains very few calories and carbs and plenty of good fiber, so you can eat it often, but not many recipes call for a whole head of cabbage. When you want less than a head, try a bag of cole slaw mix instead.

Ponyhenge update

We went, we saw, we laughed, we rode ponies in a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts. What fun! If you're in the greater Boston area, take yourself -- and your kids -- to Ponyhenge. 

Magazines with benefits

Remember when magazines were printed on paper, and delivered by the post office every week or every month? If you were like me, you read some of them right away (New York Magazine, Seventeen, Mad), and others, like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and cooking magazines, piled up for a month or more until I had time to settle in with them. These days we still get The New Yorker in print every week, because my husband Ted makes art out of the covers, but I read the magazine with my digital subscription. Same with The Atlantic. And both of those digital subscriptions come with benefits -- special interest newsletters, at no additional charge, so I'm sure to see content that most interests me.

Every Thursday, Arthur C. Brooks sets his sights, and his mighty pen, on making us happy. Not in a haha entertaining way, but in a way that helps us think our way to the life we want. He tackles the big questions of meaning and happiness in his column, How to Build a Life, in The Atlantic. Recent columns discussed how to have your most fulfilling vacation ever, the happy art of grandparenting, the narrow-but-easy path to happiness, and the happiest way to change jobs. You'll need to sign up for a digital subscription ($79.99) to The Atlantic to get this newsletter delivered to your mailbox every week, but that digital subscription will get you more than just How to Build a Life, which you can order in newsletter format. Of course you'll be able to access every article in the magazine. You can also subscribe to their other wonderful newsletters, like The Weekly Planet (climate) and The Books Briefing (new and interesting books), plus daily or weekly news updates.

A digital subscription to The New Yorker drops a newsletter called The Food Scene in my inbox every week, along with The Borowitz Report and a weekly news and politics review, plus access to all the content of the magazine, and daily crosswords during the week. Digital-only subscription: $59.99 for the first year. Worth every penny.

Gentle little murders

My husband Ted and I love few things more than to end a busy day in front of the TV, him with a clipboard full of word and number puzzles (Sudoku, crosswords, KenKen, cryptogram, Two Not Touch), me with my bag of crocheting whatever welcome blanket is in progress (currently a Barbie pink one). With the news these days being hard to watch, we look for series of police procedurals set in Britain or other European countries or farther afield, and even in the US. The requirements: good scenery, a pleasant and well-matched ensemble of police officers, engaging bad guys and gals, a bit of humor, and a murder (not too gruesome) in almost every episode. Some of our favorites include Brokenwood Mysteries (set in New Zealand; pictured above), Shetland and Line of Duty (England), Death in Paradise, Only Murders in the Building (New York) and Longmire (Wyoming), The Mallorca Files (Mallorca), and Inspector Montalbano (Sicily). If you're into the gentle murder genre, what are you watching?