Protections of the Voting Rights Act are under threat as the law marks its 60th anniversary

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By GARY FIELDS and JACK DURA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wednesday is the 60th anniversary of the day President Lyndon Johnson made his way to the U.S. Capitol and, with Martin Luther King Jr. standing behind him, signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

The act protected the right to vote and ensured the government would fight efforts to suppress it, especially those aimed at Black voters. For many Americans, it was the day U.S. democracy fully began.

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That was then.

The law has been slowly eroding for more than a decade, starting with the 2013 Supreme Court decision ending the requirement that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting get federal approval before changing the way they hold elections. Within hours of the ruling, some states that had been under the preclearance provision began announcing plans for stricter voting laws.

Those changes have continued, especially since the 2020 presidential election and President Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him reelection. The Supreme Court upheld a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2023, but in its upcoming term it’s scheduled to hear a case that could roll back that decision and another that would effectively neuter the law.

Voting rights experts say those cases will largely determine whether a landmark law passed during a turbulent era decades ago will have future anniversaries to mark.

“We’re at a critical juncture right now,” said Demetria McCain, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “And, let’s be clear, our democracy is only about to turn 60 when the Voting Rights Act anniversary gets here. I say that because there are so many attacks on voting rights, particularly as it relates to Black communities and communities of color.”

Native Americans celebrate a win that could be temporary

The reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians is about 10 miles from the Canadian border, a region of forests, small lakes and vast prairie land. Its main highway is a mix of small houses, mobile homes and businesses. A gleaming casino and hotel stand out, not far from grazing bison.

In 2024, the tribe and another in North Dakota, the Spirit Lake Tribe, formed a joint political district for the first time. They had filed a lawsuit arguing that the way lines were drawn for state legislative seats denied them the right to elect candidates of their choice. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Peter Welte agreed and put a new map in place.

State Rep. Collette Brown ran for the legislature because she wanted to see more Native American representation, and she won under the new map.

FILE – North Dakota Democratic Rep. Collette Brown is seen on May 1, 2025, during a bill signing in Memorial Hall of the state Capitol in Bismarck, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura, File)

“It felt surreal. I felt accomplished, I felt recognized,” said Brown, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and the Spirit Lake Tribe’s Gaming Commission executive director. “I felt, OK, it’s time for us to really start making change and really start educating from within so that we’re not silenced.”

Brown, a Democrat, co-sponsored several bills on Native American issues that became law, including aid for repatriation of remains and artifacts and alerts for missing Indigenous people.

This year’s anniversary of the Voting Rights Act “forces you to look at how far we’ve come,” from Native Americans to women, said Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain tribe.

Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Tribal Chairman Jamie Azure poses for a photo near a tepee on Wednesday, July 23, 2025, at the Turtle Mountain Recovery Center on the tribe’s reservation near Belcourt, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Now the future of their district is in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Will individuals be allowed to file voting rights challenges?

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers North Dakota and six other states, overturned Welte’s decision 2-1, saying the tribes and entities such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU do not have a right to sue over potential violations of voters’ constitutional rights.

That ruling expanded on an earlier 8th Circuit opinion out of Arkansas that rejected a different challenge on the same grounds. Late last month, a 3rd Circuit court panel ruled in a separate case out of Arkansas that only the U.S. attorney general can file such cases — not private individuals or groups.

Those decisions upended decades of precedent. The Supreme Court has stayed the ruling for the tribes while it decides whether it will take the North Dakota case.

The University of Michigan Law School Voting Rights Initiative found that since 1982 nearly 87% of claims under that part of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2, were from private individuals and organizations.

Leaving individuals without the ability to file challenges is especially troublesome now because the Justice Department under Trump, a Republican, seems focused on other priorities, said Sophia Lin Lakin, who heads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

The government’s voting rights unit has been dismantled and given new priorities that, she said, have turned enforcement “against the very people it was created to protect.”

The Justice Department declined to answer questions about its voting rights priorities, cases it is pursuing or whether it would be involved in the voting rights cases coming before the nation’s highest court.

Supreme Court weighs another case on race and congressional districts

Two years ago, voting rights activists celebrated when the Supreme Court preserved Section 2 in a case out of Alabama that required the state to draw an addition congressional district to benefit Black voters. Now it’s poised to rehear a similar case out of Louisiana that could modify or undo that decision.

The court heard the case in March but did not make a decision during the term. In an order on Friday, the court asked the lawyers to supply briefs explaining “whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”

Robert Weiner, the director of voting rights for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said while it is a “matter of concern” that the court is asking the question, the fact the nine justices did not reach a decision during the last term suggests there weren’t five votes already.

“They wouldn’t need re-argument if the sides had already been chosen,“ he said.

Trump’s Justice Department shifts focus on voting issues

At a time when the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act are under threat, the Justice Department has shifted its election-related priorities.

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, it has dropped or withdrawn from several election- and voting-related cases. The department instead has focused on concerns of voter fraud raised by conservative activists following years of false claims surrounding elections.

The department also has sent requests for voter registration information as well as data on election fraud and warnings of election violations to at least 19 states.

In addition to the shift in focus at the Justice Department, federal legislation to protect voting rights has gone nowhere. Democrats have reintroduced the John Lewis voting rights bill, but it’s legislation they failed to pass in 2022 when they held both houses of Congress and the White House and needed some Republican support in the Senate.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order seeking to overhaul voting in the states, which includes a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement on the federal voting form, though much of it has been blocked in the courts. The GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. And gerrymandering state legislative and congressional districts remains prevalent.

The slow chipping away at the 60-year-old law has created a nation with an unequal distribution of voting rights, said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights center at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some states have been active in expanding access to voting while others have been focused on restricting the vote.

“The last five to 10 years,” he said, “the experiences of voters increasingly depend on where they live.”

Dura reported from Belcourt, N.D. Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

‘Leanne’ review: From standup comedian to awkward sitcom star

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The multi-camera sitcom has been on its last legs, which is too bad because it can be such an uproarious format when it prioritizes jokes over the kind of comedy that tends to predominate on streaming: Pleasant enough — fun, even — but straight-up laughs aren’t their reason for being. Television is cyclical, and maybe the fizzy possibilities inherent in sitcoms will eventually make their way back onto our screens. Alas, “Leanne” on Netflix will not be leading the charge.

Standup comedian Leanne Morgan stars as the mother of two grown children in Knoxville, Tennessee, who is suddenly informed that her husband of 33 years is leaving her for another woman. That setup, coupled with the Southern twang of the cast, may bring to mind “Reba,” another eponymous show with a similar premise that premiered more than 20 years ago and ran for six seasons, starring Reba McEntire as a spitfire making do with her new circumstances. But the energy here is vastly different, with Morgan’s genteel suburbanite hazily floating through this next chapter in her life.

Co-created by Morgan and sitcom veterans Chuck Lorre and Susan McMartin (“Mom”), the series also stars “Mom” alum Kristen Johnson as Leanne’s kinda-sorta bawdy sister (she’s too tame to really pop as a subversive presence), Celia Weston and Blake Clark as their aging parents, and Ryan Stiles (“Whose Line Is It Anyway?”) as Leanne’s ex.

I wish “Mom” were more instructive as a test case, because it also started off unevenly but eventually found its groove. The push-pull, co-dependent relationship between a mother and daughter, both of whom were in addiction recovery and struggling financially, gave the show its spark, as did the friend group of fellow recovering addicts, who deepened the bench of characters. “Leanne” feels somewhat claustrophobic by comparison, and isn’t populated with anyone who feels especially defined or even interesting. It’s just Leanne and her sister as gal pals who mostly get along bouncing off themselves, their needy parents and Leanne’s forgettably superfluous children.

Most comedies built around a comedian’s standup act draw directly from their lives. But it’s worth noting that the real Leanne is very much not divorced from her longtime husband; in fact, her gentle barbs about their personality differences make up the bulk of her material. Morgan is also not an actor by training, so it makes no sense that the show didn’t adapt more of her stage persona here, and instead asks her to play something unfamiliar: That tricky sad-funny middle ground of a woman whose marriage has imploded.

There’s a deliberate pace to the show — and to the dialogue itself — that results in punchlines just laying there. It’s weird, because there’s an unhurried pace to Morgan’s Netflix standup special as well (“I’m Every Woman”), but in it she has some bite and her leisurely cadence is undercut by the sharp comedy of her material, whereas this version of Leanne is oddly bland and lacking a point of view.

Exactly one joke lands. Looking at a miserable Leanne, her sister offers to share some of her pill stash: “I got Xanax, Ativan, Ambien, I think this might be a laxative …”

Leanne grabs the last one: “I’ll always take a laxative.”

There’s a certain amount of violence that’s played for laughs, but the show seems uncertain where the humor actually lies in these moments. One episode ends with Leanne decking her husband across the jaw. In another, she finds him in the bathroom they once shared, making himself at home, and in response she grabs a shotgun, marches back in and blows a hole through the ceiling to disabuse him of this notion. If she were really trying to stifle deep rage under a polite, decorous exterior, and that was a running theme in the show — of a woman’s worst impulses taking over as she’s finally driven off the deep end — that would be so dark, it might come around the other side and be funny as well. But that’s not the kind of sitcom this is.

Leanne lives in a spacious, well-appointed suburban-style home that apparently goes uncontested in the divorce. In fact, money barely comes up at all. Rarely does divorce not affect either party’s finances, but also because Morgan acknowledges the realities of money in her standup act. It’s clearly on her mind. Spotting an array of attractive men in the front row of her special: “Look at y’all in these half-zip golf pullovers — hello, that says ‘health insurance’ to me. Alright, y’all make me think of my husband, lemme tell you about him, ‘cause he’s got a 401k.”

(Even her grown son in real life — who loves nature so much he raised a baby beaver in his college dorm room, a story she tells in her standup — sounds a lot more interesting than the character on the show, whose only trait appears to be “henpecked husband.”)

Now in middle age, Leanne’s life as she’s known it (the sitcom version, at least) has been turned upside down. Except it hasn’t. She’s in the same sprawling house. She doesn’t seem worried about money. She didn’t have much filling her days even before the divorce apparently — she has no professional life nor a social life outside of her sister (who doesn’t seem to need to work, either). Leanne’s existence is like science fiction — resembling something human but in a contextless bubble that has no connection to anything outside the walls of her home.

“You have a blessed Sunday,” she says at one point, and it’s the kind of Southern putdown that’s in the same neighborhood as “Bless your heart.” May “Leanne” have a blessed run. And may Morgan have another shot at a TV role better suited to her talents.

“Leanne” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Netflix

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

As last baby boomers reach retirement, they tackle a quest for fulfillment

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Forty-two stories above ground, Jon Gottlieb traced his bicycle route. From his vantage point by the pool, on his building’s roof, he could see the stop sign where he turns right, the road he hates crossing, the park he rides through and the tunnel that leads to the Lakefront Trail bike path.

Gottlieb, 75, rode this route at least five times a week through the 13 years since he moved into the Lincoln Park building, the tail end of a five-decade commitment to cycling. For half a century, the retired railroad services manager tracked his mileage on bicycles and compiled it in a spreadsheet. Mark Mattei, who serviced Gottlieb’s bikes for 36 years, said it was clear that Gottlieb was honest about his mileage.

In 2020, he passed 100,000 miles on his bike. In 2023, he hit 110,000. Last week, Gottlieb prepared for two-wheel retirement as he geared up to ride his 115,000th mile. He reached his final threshold Friday.

“You gotta quit somewhere,” he said.

With his serious cycling days behind him, Gottlieb faces a life unstructured by a goal. He’s retired, happily married and financially comfortable. But like others on the older side of the baby boomer generation, he’s not quite sure how to spend his days without reaching toward something.

Some experts say that Americans tend to identify themselves with their careers, which leaves them feeling lost in retirement. Others, though, have found that baby boomers, especially the younger ones, are much better at finding fulfillment outside work than their parents were. As the last of the baby boomers reach retirement age, they have to manage more than financial stability — they’re figuring out what fulfillment looks like.

The baby boomer generation was born in what Gottlieb called “the backwash of the Second World War,” or the years 1946 through 1964. According to the Alliance for Lifetime Income, the United States is facing its greatest “retirement surge” ever, as more than 11,000 Americans turn 65 every day. For people who can afford to retire, and aren’t burdened by serious health issues, rebuilding a routine is usually the toughest challenge retirement offers.

“There’s a lot of detriment when the structure that you normally have gotten from your occupation is no longer there, and it’s kind of that rug being pulled out from underneath you,” said Michael Wolf, a professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine who researches aging.

For people who connect their identities to their jobs, Wolf said, retirement is gutting, as they experience a loss of identity and self worth. The happier retirees Wolf sees in his work are typically those who figure out what brings them joy ahead of retirement.

“You need to be able to not think of retirement as something like going cold turkey from work,” Wolf said. “You need to envision it as a staged process.”

 

Jon Gottlieb, dressed to celebrate the 115,000 mile accomplishment, maneuvers his bicycle over a crosswalk in Chicago, Aug. 1, 2025. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

‘Desire to find a balance’

Stacks of vintage toys block nearly every window on the first floor of Mattei’s house in Lincoln Park. Two wooden chairs are the only furniture on the floor, unless you count the dozens of display cases filled with toy cars. Hundreds of them flood each room, some in every color, stacked on top of each other on shelves, in old paper boxes or standing alone. Model boats and airplanes squeeze between shelves and shelves of tiny cars; a glow-in-the-dark pirate ship perches in a corner; one-of-a-kind paintings of model planes crowd the ceiling.

Mattei, 74, closed Cycle Smithy, the bicycle store and repair shop he owned for 49 years, in 2022 — to Gottlieb’s dismay. Mattei had worked seven days a week for the better part of half a century, reached the age of 71, and could afford to retire — so he did. He took everything down, swept the floors and left the large storefront exactly the way he had found it years before. To his surprise, Mattei was calm.

“I was worried about retiring because I thought I would have some sort of existential crisis,” he said, three years into retirement. “That wasn’t a problem at all.”

Though he liked Cycle Smithy, Mattei found himself far less stressed once the shop was closed. These days, he sometimes has dreams about horrible customers at work and wakes up relieved that he doesn’t have to face his job anymore.

“I find happiness in the freedom to do whatever I want, even if I don’t really do anything,” Mattei said.

Mattei doesn’t feel aimless as he climbs into his mid-70s; he still has goals, even if they’ve changed. He’s focused on preparing for the end of his life. In January, he started selling from his vintage collection. In the next three years, he would like to have sold almost all of it, at market prices to genuinely interested buyers. He doesn’t want to die and leave his wife with a floor’s worth of stuff to clear out, but it’s important to Mattei that the items he holds dear end up in the right hands.

Through the selling process, he’s met other dedicated collectors of vintage toys. Some will fly in from California or Florida to see his collection and spend several hours with Mattei. That, and the other friendships he maintains — often with old employees at Cycle Smithy — keeps Mattei feeling fulfilled.

George Mannes, executive editor of AARP The Magazine, is surrounded by people like Mattei, who have redefined what purpose looks like after ending their careers. At 62, Mannes is on the tail end of the baby boomer generation, with many of his friends and colleagues in the early stages of retirement.

Mannes has found that people his age are much better at handling retirement than their parents. Retirees in their 60s, Mannes said, have built identities less associated with their careers. Many of them find fulfillment in volunteer work or artistic outlets: Mannes has a friend who organizes a trash clean up club and another who is learning the art of ceramics. The latter isn’t quite retired, but identifying her passion ahead of time — like Wolf recommended — has made her feel optimistic about leaving work soon.

“I am finding, among the people I know right now, that they’re very happy to walk away from (work), and try new things and live new lives,” Mannes said.

He thinks his generation’s more positive attitude toward retirement might stem from the wealth with which so many baby boomers grew up. Many of them learned how to enjoy themselves and prioritize a work-life balance long ago, before retirement was really on their minds. Their parents, however, often “fiercely identified with their occupations,” according to Mannes.

“I see a desire to find a balance between giving to the community and connecting with friends, but also just having the free time to goof off in the way that you want to goof off,” Mannes said.

The art of letting go

Nancy Gottlieb, 73, retired from the world of banks and trading firms at 64 and successfully struck Mannes’ balance. Leaving work hasn’t been an issue for her.

“I think it’s usually more of a problem for men than women,” she said.

While Jon Gottlieb pores over statistics-based baseball simulations — alone — his wife goes out to eat. She plays cards or mahjong five times a week and regularly calls friends on the phone. Jon has friends, too, but his social calendar is not nearly as robust as his wife’s.

Nancy Gottlieb thinks women are more likely to maintain friendships and ask each other out for lunch or coffee. Mannes hasn’t seen many men of his age struggle with retirement, but Wolf agrees with Nancy. Social isolation is more common among men than women, he said, and men participate in activities less than women.

“The running joke has always been that women are gathering friends as they get older, while men are shedding them,” Wolf said.

He explained that socialization is a “major” determinant of health. Members of older generations who tend to isolate, or are generally disconnected from society, are often at a greater risk of mortality. Boredom, too, has a serious effect on health.

But Tai Chin, 75, is wary of needing a goal to sustain him. He just moved into Gottlieb’s building after 40 years in Arlington, Texas, so he could be closer to his sons and grandchildren. He’s divorced and not interested in changing that.

“I’m alone, but I’m not lonely,” he said.

Chin hasn’t fully retired yet from his job helping people sign up for health care coverage; he doesn’t see the point. He works on his own time, entirely remote. These days, he only does about five hours a week plus the time he has to spend renewing his license before September. The rest of the day is his, spent mostly on yoga, messing around on his computer, taking walks and reading.

Chin reads a lot of mystical literature. He’s learning how to exist in the moment and accept the phase of life that he’s in now, when his responsibilities are dwindling and he has, essentially, total freedom.

“My goal would be to not have any goals,” he said.

Gottlieb ultimately wants the same thing, even if he won’t take Chin’s meditative approach. At this late stage in his life, he faces what, for him, might be akin to a Herculean task. His best friend, Bob Burger, isn’t sure Gottlieb can really give up cycling. In his eyes, Gottlieb is unusually motivated, the type of man who needs something to reach for.

“Sometimes retirement creates a void for people,” said Burger, 74, who lives in Wilmette.

For his part, Burger has had no trouble with retirement. He gave up a job he didn’t enjoy very much when he was 49 and took to traveling the world with his wife. In September, he’s leaving for Croatia, Ireland and the Alps.

“I’m much happier being a nobody without work,” Burger said. He’s not so sure, though, that Gottlieb — who not only never sits down but also rarely stops talking — can be a nobody.

Gottlieb is an intense guy; he said so himself. He wakes up at 6 a.m. every day and wears some variation of the same shirt every time he rides his bike. The only time Gottlieb “goofs off” is during his daily gossip session with a group of old ladies. They float on pool noodles and discuss the geriatric drama of their high-rise.

Maybe fulfillment, for Gottlieb, will always be tied to bicycles. He has failed, so far, at cycling retirement: A week after he reached mile 115,000, he was still riding almost every morning. He’s been trying to find an adult tricycle to ride, so that he can stay active in a safer manner, but it’s not the kind of contraption widely available in Chicago. For now, Gottlieb is still a two-wheel guy. Who knows if he’ll ever master the art of giving up.

Recipe: Cheeseburger rice paper spirals offer tasty gluten-free option

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By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Fast food burgers hit the spot on road trips and when you’re pressed for time. But given most sandwich buns are made with wheat, there often aren’t a lot of options for those with gluten allergies.

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These burger spirals are an acceptable gluten-free solution: They’re made with rice paper wrappers.

Usually the thin, transparent rounds made from rice, water and salt are the foundation for Vietnamese summer rolls — fresh spring rolls filled with shredded vegetables, fresh herbs, noodles and proteins like shrimp and pork and served cold.

Here, in an attempt to replicate the flavor of McDonald’s signature burger, the wrappers are stuffed Big Mac-style with ground beef, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, rolled burrito-style into a tight cylinder, curled into a spiral and baked to a golden crisp under a sprinkle of sesame seed.

A tangy, mayo-based special sauce crafted with yellow mustard and sweet pickle relish is served on the side for dipping, along with shoestring fries.

Recipes for the culinary creation dubbed the “Big Mac Spiral” have been making the rounds on social media for a while, and I’m guessing it’s because the spirals actually are a fairly good facsimile of the real deal. The rice paper bakes up crispy, the ingredients are fairly economical and for those on gluten-free diets, there’s no worries about cross-contamination with flour.

Rice paper rounds aren’t as delicate as they might appear, but you do have to be careful when rehydrating them. Also, they need only a few seconds in the egg wash; linger too long and they’ll get too soft and be tricky to work with.

It helps to get all the ingredients organized at a work station before you prepare to roll. Lightly oiling the cutting board so nothing sticks will also make rolling easier, along with allowing yourself a few tries to get the hang of it. Practice makes perfect!

Don’t fret over small tears, as they can be repaired by overlapping the rounds. If the rip is too big to work with, simply replace the torn sheet with a fresh round — a package comes with more than the 12 sheets you need to make this recipe.

I served the rolls with a copycat McDonald’s special sauce but you could use thousand island dressing. Or, simply dip the spirals in Heinz ketchup. Fries go best as a side.

Cheeseburger Rice Paper Spirals

PG tested

1 pound ground beef

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Pinch or two of garlic powder

12 rice paper sheets

2 eggs, beaten with a little water

Handful shredded lettuce

1/2 cup shredded American or cheddar cheese, or more to taste

1/4 cup finely diced dill pickles or pickle relish, or more to taste

1/4 cup finely diced onion, or more to taste

Sesame seeds, for garnish

For dipping sauce

1/2 cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish

1 tablespoon grated yellow onion

2 teaspoons yellow mustard

1/2 teaspoon white vinegar

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon onion powder

1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

Squirt or two of ketchup

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Brown and crumble ground beef in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Drain any grease. Season to taste with salt, pepper and a little garlic powder.

Whisk eggs with a little water in a wide and shallow bowl (it should be large enough to hold a rice paper round comfortably). One at a time, carefully dip 3 rice papers into the beaten egg for a few seconds until they soften (be gentle!), then lay them in a row with the edges overlapping on a lightly oiled cutting board.

Spoon 1/4 of the ground beef evenly across the top of the sheets, followed by shredded lettuce, shredded cheese, diced pickles and onions.

Roll up like a cigar into a tight cylinder, then gently curve it around itself into a spiral.

Place spirals on a parchment paper-covered baking sheet. Brush with a little bit of the egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Repeat with remaining wrappers and fillings.

Bake spirals in preheated oven for 20 minutes, or until crispy and golden brown.

While spirals are baking, make sauce by stirring all the ingredients together in a small bowl. Taste and add more seasoning if needed. Set aside.

When spirals are done baking, remove from the oven and serve immediately with dipping sauce.

Serves 4.

— Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette

©2025 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.