By ALBERT STUMM, Associated Press

Mealtimes by the Caspian Sea were always displays of abundance. Omid Roustaei’s extended family would gather every summer, swimming at the beach in the morning and returning to mounds of food at the family villa.

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Pomegranate, bitter orange, dried lime, walnut and olive appeared on repeat. The earthy scents of cumin and coriander blended with sweeter cinnamon and cardamom — maybe even pulverized rose petals.

Plus, there were herbs. Handfuls of parsley, cilantro and dill tossed into stewing pots and served by the bunch for munching at the table.

“To us in Persian food, herbs are not treated as little, cute things you put on the side of the plate, but rather herbs to us are vegetables,” said Roustaei, author of the new cookbook “Bitter and Sweet: Global Flavors from an Iranian-American Kitchen.” “When we cook a dish, we use mounds of herbs.”

The tranquility of a childhood mixing cosmopolitan Tehran with summers in the north would be shattered when he was about 10 years old. The Iranian Revolution was brewing, and several years later he left the country, first going to the Netherlands and then Arizona.

It took decades for Roustaei to return to his Iranian roots and explore the cuisine of his youth. Eventually, he made his way to Seattle, began giving cooking classes, and started a blog called The Caspian Chef.

Besides making tasty meals, Roustaei hopes that making Iran’s culinary traditions more visible serves as a type of diplomacy. He sheds light on universal traditions, like caring for your family and bringing people together.

“Through the food, which always feels like this safe gateway, it allows people to get to know Iran and who Iranians truly are,” said Roustaei, who is also a psychotherapist.

He attempts to demystify what is a fairly complex cuisine. What Iranians consider “plain rice,” for instance, is actually more of an art form. The rice is scented by saffron and maybe mixed with yogurt, which produces light and fluffy grains with a crispy layer of golden tahdig, meaning “bottom of the pot.”

The book is filled with dishes that would have been familiar on that long-ago family table, but many include personal twists that reflect a modern lifestyle.

One, khoresh fesenjun, reminds Roustaei of his mother. Bone-in chicken is braised in a dark sauce made from sauteed onions and ground walnuts. Reflecting Iranians’ penchant for sour flavors, the sauce is brightened by sweet-tart pomegranate paste, which is made by patiently simmering the vibrant juice until most of the liquid evaporates.

Since she didn’t have a food processor, his mother crushed one walnut at a time on a wooden tray, mashing each piece with a river rock. Making it took hours.

For the average American home cook, a food processor or blender gets close enough, and pomegranate molasses is easier to find than the paste. It will still be delicious, evoking the pleasures of the Caspian Sea.

“I find it to be really easy to prepare, accessible and yet profoundly unique in its taste,” he said.

The recipe:

Chicken in Pomegranate and Walnut Sauce

From “Bitter and Sweet: Global Flavors from an Iranian-American Kitchen,” by Omid Roustaei

Ingredients:

2 cups walnuts
2 tablespoons neutral oil
4 chicken thighs (about 1½ pounds), bone in and skin on
1 onion, diced
½ cup pomegranate molasses
½ cup water
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
2–4 tablespoons sugar (optional)
½ teaspoon saffron threads, ground and bloomed in 1 tablespoon hot water

Directions:

In a food processor, chop the walnuts and process until finely ground. Set aside.

In a Dutch oven over medium-high, heat the oil and cook the chicken, skin side down until golden, about 5 minutes on each side. Place the chicken on a plate, and set aside. Lower to medium, cook the onion until aromatic and lightly golden, about 10 minutes.

Add the walnuts to the onion. Reduce to medium-low and stir continuously for 2–3 minutes. The walnuts should appear slightly dense and sticky. Add the pomegranate molasses, water, salt, and pepper and stir to combine.

Return the chicken to the pot and immerse in the sauce. Partially cover the pot with the lid and raise the heat to simmer gently. When it bubbles, reduce to low and cover. Stir occasionally and scrape the bottom with a flat-edge spatula to inhibit crusting. After 40 minutes, taste the sauce and add more pomegranate molasses or sugar if needed. You’re aiming for a robust pomegranate flavor with a balanced sweet and tart profile.

Simmer until the sauce becomes deep maroon and the chicken falls off the bone, up to another hour. Stir in the bloomed saffron.

Turn off the heat and let stand covered for 10 minutes. The natural oil from the walnuts and chicken will rise to the top. That’s a sign of a khoresh that is jā-oftādeh, a Persian culinary term for a well-prepared stew.

Serve with steamed basmati rice.

Albert Stumm lives in Barcelona and writes about food, travel and wellness. Find his work at https://www.albertstumm.com

I’ll never forget the water-filled light bulbs.

Weeks after Hurricane Floyd flooded the North Carolina towns of Princeville and Tarboro in 1999, I made a reporting trip there to find out how residents were coping. A man escorted me inside his single-story house, which had been submerged for days under water the height of a basketball hoop. As we stood under the kitchen chandelier (his table had floated into the living room), he reached up to tap the light fixture’s flame-shaped bulbs. Water had displaced the gas inside.

The man was happy to salvage his framed, water-stained army discharge certificate. But as for the ruined house, he doubted his insurance would pay the full cost of rebuilding.

Being underinsured still happens more often than you think. In fact, there’s a good chance you have insufficient homeowners insurance coverage. You can fix that, and protect yourself financially, by shopping for home insurance carefully and making a few phone calls. Here’s how.

Beware undercoverage

The core of your home insurance policy is dwelling coverage: the part of the policy that will pay to repair or rebuild your home. The policy specifies the maximum amount it will pay. Watch out, because your dwelling coverage limit could be too low.

“One of the biggest mistakes we see, when reviewing policies, is that the dwelling coverage is not enough to rebuild the home in the event of a disaster,” said Celia Santana, CEO of Personal Risk Management Solutions, an insurance brokerage in New York City. “We see this on 65% of the prospects we meet with.”

Undercoverage appears to be widespread. Take the Marshall Fire, a 2021 wildfire that destroyed almost 1,000 buildings in Boulder County, Colorado. Almost three-quarters of the homeowners were underinsured, according to a research paper, “Coverage Neglect in Homeowners Insurance,” published in December 2024 by scholars from the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin.

After the Marshall Fire, “we find that underinsurance significantly delays rebuilding and makes fire survivors more likely to sell their homes,” the paper concludes.

Here’s what that could look like in your life: Your house burns down and you have $300,000 in dwelling coverage — but you discover that it will cost $400,000 to rebuild. The mortgage lender expects you to build a house of similar value. So you spend months or years scraping up the $100,000 difference before you can rebuild. Or, if you can pay off the mortgage, you sell the property and move away.

Besides having a too-low dwelling coverage limit, there’s another type of undercoverage: not having all the insurance policies you need. Standard home insurance doesn’t pay to fix damage resulting from earthquakes or floods. To get coverage for those disasters, you have to buy separate insurance policies.

Get the coverage you need

Whether you’re buying a home or renewing your policy, the best way to shop is by asking probing questions of insurance agents and finding out how much it would cost to rebuild the house. First, ask if you should buy earthquake or flood insurance. You might think you already know the answer, but you could be wrong.

Just as important, make sure you have enough dwelling coverage to replace the home if it’s destroyed. That amount isn’t the same as the value of the house. “Do not confuse market value with replacement value,” Santana said.

When providing a rate quote, an insurance agent likely plugs the home’s square footage and other information into a calculator that spits out a dollar amount representing the cost to rebuild. You shouldn’t take that calculation as the final word.

Instead, call general contractors to ask if the insurer’s recommended coverage limit is adequate, advises Kevin Daley, president of the private client group for EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants. He says to ask: Could you rebuild my house within this coverage limit?

Daley says that oftentimes, the contractor will respond with something like: “Look, your insurance company thinks this house can be built for 400 grand. I’m telling you right now it’s 455 minimum.”

If a contractor comes out to take a look at your house, expect to pay a fee.

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Consider extended replacement cost coverage

Even after you talk with a contractor to learn the true cost of rebuilding, that dollar amount might be insufficient after a natural disaster. Here’s why: If your house burns but the neighboring houses are untouched, you’ll navigate a market in which building supplies and construction workers are typically available, and prices and wages are predictable. But if your whole neighborhood burns in a wildfire, those markets break down.

After a disaster, hundreds of nearby homeowners might need building materials and construction workers at the same time. Demand exceeds supply, so prices and wages go up. A house that would normally cost $455,000 to rebuild could suddenly cost more than half a million dollars to construct.

That’s where extended replacement cost coverage comes in. It pays up to a certain percentage above your dwelling coverage limit if costs are higher than expected. For example, if you have $400,000 in dwelling coverage, plus an endorsement adding 25% in extended replacement cost coverage, the insurer will add 25% (or $100,000) to your limit, raising it to $500,000.

“You want to get your dwelling coverage to an amount where you’d be able to rebuild if it’s just your house” that’s destroyed, says Emily Rogan, senior program officer for United Policyholders, a nonprofit information resource for policyholders. Beyond that, she says, you’d rely on extended replacement cost coverage for a worst-case scenario, community-level disaster.

Shopping for insurance

Ideally, you have full coverage the day you buy a home. If not, you can beef up your insurance when you’re better informed and have the money to pay for it. Sooner is better, because you can’t know when disaster will strike.

As you talk to agents, bring up the type of scenarios that drift into your head as you try to fall asleep. If a tree crashes through my roof, will insurance pay for a whole new roof, or just the damaged section? Will insurance pay my rent if I’m displaced, and if so, how much or for how long? The insurer might soothe your fears by adding endorsements (for additional charges) that add oomph to your basic coverage.

Buying adequate home insurance might cost more, but you’ll sleep better.

Holden Lewis writes for NerdWallet. Email: hlewis@nerdwallet.com.

The article Check Your Home Insurance Now, Avoid Regret Later originally appeared on NerdWallet.

By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org

Across the country, state lawmakers are finding rare bipartisan ground on an increasingly urgent issue for educators and parents: banning cellphone use in schools.

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Fueling these bans is growing research on the harmful effects of smartphone and social media use on the mental health and academic achievement of grade to high school students.

In 2024, at least eight states — California, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia — either expanded or adopted policies or laws to curtail cellphone use in schools.

This year, lawmakers in Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin have proposed bans moving in their state legislatures.

Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently signed a law requiring schools to ban students’ access to cellphones and other personal electronic devices during the school day.

Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds introduced a broader electronics device ban this year.

Last month, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled her plans to ban smartphones at schools.

And Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has proposed a statewide ban on cellphones in classrooms.

Some experts warn, however, that these bans might be difficult to enforce — or may simply be outdated before they even take effect.

“The genie is out of the bottle, and squeezing it back in is going to be nearly impossible,” said Ken Trump, a longtime school safety expert and president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm. “Phones and social media have fundamentally changed society, and by extension, schooling. Outright bans may be unrealistic or difficult to enforce effectively.”

Trump thinks governors, in particular, are responding to a trend rather than conducting thorough research. “Our elected officials are running to say, ‘he [introduced a bill] so I’m going to do it too.’ … Once Florida passed their bill, it’s been an explosion.”

Florida in 2023 became the first state to enact an outright ban on cellphone use during instructional time, followed by Louisiana and South Carolina last year. Other states, including Alaska and Connecticut, issued recommendations rather than mandates, encouraging local districts to develop their own policies.

In Minnesota, districts are required to implement their own policies under the law passed last year. But a bill sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Alice Mann would ban cellphones and smartwatches in elementary and middle schools, and restrict the use of those devices in high school classrooms beginning in the 2026-2027 school year.

Mann began considering the measure after hearing directly from students last year.

“We had a committee hearing where kids told us how distracting cellphones were. That really caught our attention,” she said. “We talked to school districts across the state — some had no policy, some had bans for one or two years, and some had bans for longer. The ones with bans all said the same thing: ‘It’s been wonderful.’”

Enforcement

Even where bans exist, enforcement varies widely. Some schools use Yondr pouches, lockable sleeves that prevent phone access during the school day. Others require students to store their phones in lockers or classroom pouches, while some schools rely on simple classroom rules prohibiting phone use.

According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of U.S. high school teachers say that cellphone distraction is a major issue in their classrooms. While many teachers and administrators report positive changes after bans, students have quickly adapted, finding ways to bypass rules by slipping calculators or dummy phones into pouches, or switching to smartwatches to check social media and send texts.

“Students are more tech-savvy than lawmakers,” said Trump, the school safety expert. “They find workarounds — whether it’s through smartwatches, Chromebooks or school Wi-Fi.”

States such as Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho and Pennsylvania allocated funding for programs that provide schools with lockable phone storage pouches, or financial rewards for districts that create their own restrictive policies.

A proposed bill in Texas would go so far as to charge students up to $30 to retrieve a phone that was confiscated for violating a cellphone ban.

Schools have wrestled with how to regulate mobile devices for decades — with bans on devices such as pagers dating back to the late 1980s. In 2024, 76% of U.S. public schools prohibited cellphones for nonacademic use, notes the National Center for Education Statistics.

Total bans?

The Girls Athletic Leadership School Los Angeles has enforced strict no-phone policies since its founding in 2016. The charter school’s no-phone policy means no usage on campus, during off-campus experiences, or even on school buses — a step beyond most phone bans.

“Cellphones present a major distraction and temptation for students,” Vanessa Garza, Girls Athletic Leadership School Los Angeles executive director and founding principal, wrote in a statement to Stateline. “This long-standing policy has allowed our students to foster deep friendships, experience enhanced learning, and regulate healthy emotions.”

Instead of top-down state mandates, Trump, the school security expert, thinks that schools should focus on reasonable restrictions and consensus-based policies that work for individual communities.

“If you try to ban phones entirely, enforcement becomes a nightmare,” he said. “What happens when kids don’t comply? Are schools going to dedicate staff just to cellphone discipline? If policies aren’t enforced consistently, they become meaningless.”

Trump said in school emergencies, students flooding 911 with calls can overwhelm emergency responders.

Mann, the Minnesota lawmaker, dismissed the idea that the pushback on phone bans is coming from students. Instead, she thinks parents are the ones most resistant to restrictions.

“Some parents are worried they won’t be able to reach their kids, but they absolutely can. If a parent needs to get in touch with their child, they can call the school, just like they always could before cellphones were in every pocket,” said Mann.

“What we’re hearing from students is that their phones are pinging in class all day long — and a lot of it is from parents. Parents texting, ‘What should we have for dinner?’ or ‘I’ll be home late.’ These are not emergencies.”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Three years ago, the Minnesota Gophers went on a run that included a Big Ten hockey title and their first trip to the NCAA Frozen Four under head coach Bob Motzko. But there were inevitable bumps along the way – most notably star goalie Jack LaFontaine’s abrupt decision in early January to sign a pro contract and leave the crease in the hands of untested and unknown Justen Close.

A day or two after LaFontaine cleared out his locker and headed out to what would eventually be 80 minutes in the NHL with the Carolina Hurricanes, the remaining Gophers players found these words written by Motzko and one of his assistants on the home locker room’s whiteboard:

“We have all that we need. And we need all that we have.”

In that vein, with the NHL trade deadline still a few days away, there is a quiet sense of confidence in the Minnesota Wild locker room that if this is what they have for the stretch run that they fully expect will return them to the playoffs, then what they have is enough, as long as everyone plays a role in team success.

On Saturday, Wild general manager Bill Guerin worked a trade with Nashville to add top-six forward Gustav Nyquist. A day later, Guerin admitted that with the team’s salary cap situation and the much-publicized dead money that is on their books for another few months, they’re out of wiggle room.

He’ll will answer any general manager who calls, Guerin said, but any future trades between now and Friday afternoon might need to be of the rare one-for-one variety.

Nyquist played on the top line Sunday in a slump-busting 1-0 win over Boston that had the team in high spirits following the final horn. The Wild were again without injured forwards Kirill Kaprizov and Joel Eriksson Ek, without injured defenseman Jonas Brodin and suspended forward Ryan Hartman, eligible to return for their game at Seattle on Tuesday. But the feeling inside the locker room was that even if Nyquist is the only addition at the deadline, the team has all it needs.

“We’re gonna be fine. We’re gonna acquire Hartman for the next game, and then we got (Brodin) hopefully coming back with Ekky and Kirill, so our deadline looks fine,” a smiling Filip Gustavsson said after turning in his fourth shutout of the season. “(They’re) kind of like acquisitions. They haven’t played for a bit, so when they’re back, it’s gonna be good.”

Hartman is returning from an eight-game suspension following an altercation with Ottawa forward Tim Stuzle in early February. Initially a 10-game suspension, the NHL said it considers Hartman a repeat offender. Guerin said there is no more room for suspension-inducing behavior by the veteran.

“I expect his best behavior,” the GM said. “I think Hartsy will be excited to be back. We will be very happy to have Ryan back to the lineup. He’ll bring a lot of juice for the group. We all look forward to having him back.”

While Hartman has a time-definite return, the timetable for the other three remains a mystery — even to Guerin, who got a bit defiant when asked when he thought Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek and Brodin might be back on the line chart, or even when they might begin skating. And he reiterated a version of the message that was seen in the Gophers locker room a few years ago. Guerin believes the Wild have all that they need, and they need all that they have.

“When we play the way we are capable, when we do the right things, when we’re focused and execute well, then we can not just play with anybody, we can beat anybody,” he said. “So, I think it’s up to the guys in that locker room. They have a responsibility to be on task every night, to play the way that they’re capable of playing, and buy time for the guys to get back.”

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