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Amanda Cohen's Dirt Candy is a graphic novel, vegetarian cookbook and memoir. But because it's all of those things, it's also not exactly any of them — so it fell between the cracks.

Cohen's restaurant in New York City's East Village is called Dirt Candy because it's focused entirely on vegetables (which Cohen says are candy from the dirt). Even though the place has become a foodie destination, it's teeny, with just nine tables. The narrow dining area doubles as the prep kitchen before people come for dinner.

There's barely room to breathe as Cohen's helpers slice through heaps of long beans to be served with Moroccan herbs and coconut-poached tofu, and whisk gallons of scallion pancake batter. (That's what I swooned over during a dinner that started with crispy hot jalapeno hush puppies and a meltingly rich cube of portobello mushroom mousse, modulated with a bright truffle pear and fennel compote.)

On the 18th century gin craze

"This is a period between about ... 1720 and 1750. There's a huge amount of public disquiet, not only about the low price of gin, but the social effects that this is having. Probably the most famous representation of this is the great English artist William Hogarth produces an engraving called Gin Lane, which is a terrible image of the social breakdown that's being caused by gin ... In fact, if you wanted a very good modern parallel for the way that gin was regarded in the 18th century, crack is probably a very, very good one. And Gin Lane really does capture this in appallingly gruesome detail. All sorts of images of death and social breakdown and madness being caused by this spirit."

On what finally brought gin to respectability

"Firstly, we should say ... a very important American invention, possibly one of the great American cultural contributions to the world, is the invention of the cocktail. Through the 19th century, first of all Americans, then Europeans, get the habit of drinking spirits mixed up with the whole happy hour of other things: bitters and tonics and all sorts of things. And that helps to make gin more respectable. It's just one more ingredient in the cocktail cabinet.

"I think the second thing that helps to make gin more respectable is the growth of the gin and tonic. If you imagine colonists from Europe going out to the tropics in the 19th century, one of the biggest problems they face is malaria — terrible, terrible disease, kills many thousands of Europeans, and of course many hundreds of thousands of Africans in this period. Now, at the time, there's only one effective treatment, and that's a drug which in Britain is called quinine ... It's derived from the bark of a tree that grows in South America. Now the trouble with quinine is it's incredibly bitter; it's like chewing coffee beans. So in the 19th century lots of companies start producing more palatable ways of taking your daily quinine — this is tonic water.

"Now, British colonists in the late 19th century discover that tonic water and gin sort of complement one other. They've both got this rather sort of refreshing botanical kind of flavor. So the British start drinking the gin and tonic and making it the distinctive drink of British colonials. And they bring this habit back to Britain in the, I suppose, in the 20th century. So those are the two things that start to make gin a much more respectable prospect."

On the gin-based cocktails pink gin and Kublai Khan No. 2

"Well, pink gin again speaks to this rather wonderful global history that gin has. Pink gin is a combination of gin and bitters. Now, bitters were invented essentially in the 18th century as a kind of remedy for seasickness. So again, you've got this idea of sort of global trade and exchange; people going all around the world taking gin with them and then using it to sort of mix up their own home remedies. And pink gin became the classic drink of the British Royal Navy.

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Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is stepping down.

The Associated Press reports that:

The New York Times writes that Jackson's four years at EPA:

"Began with high hopes of sweeping action to address climate change and other environmental ills but ended with a series of rear-guard actions to defend the agency against challenges from industry, Republicans in Congress and, at times, the Obama White House. ...

"After Republicans seized control of the House in 2010, Ms. Jackson became a favored target of the new Republican majority's aversion to what it termed 'job-killing regulations.' One coal industry official accused her of waging 'regulatory jihad,' and she was summoned to testify before hostile House committees dozens of times in 2011."

There were 350,000 first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, down 12,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration reports. That's the lowest level since early March 2008.

The agency adds that "the 4-week moving average," which tends to smooth out some of the volatility that comes with the weekly figures, "was 356,750, a decrease of 11,250 from the previous week's revised average of 368,000."

All those figures are "seasonally adjusted," meaning that they're tweaked to supposedly account for such things as the holidays. But, as Bloomberg News reports, "claims in 19 states and territories were estimated because government office closures on Dec. 24 prevented a complete count, a Labor Department spokesman said as the figures were released."

So watch for some revisions in coming weeks.

Later this morning, we should get fresh figures on new home sales and consumer confidence.