Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature, and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.

Hey, I'm Frances Lamb, and this is Splendid Table Selects, our mini podcast on the stuff that makes us better cooks and eaters.

Our presenting sponsor is Bob's Red Mill. They're an employee-owned company that's offered organic, gluten-free, stone ground products for decades, and they're experts of making healthy taste amazing.

Look, I don't really believe in baking season in that I really don't see why I should be any less psych to eat a cake in July than in December, but for those of you who do believe, baking season's in full swing. And in our show's home state of Minnesota, holiday cookie baking is a knockdown, drag-out competition, thanks to

the food section of the Star Tribune. 15 years ago, Rick Nelson, the Papers' restaurant writer,

suggested that they have a little holiday cookie contest for the readers. I mean, no big deal,

right? A few people send in their favorite recipes, you pick a winner. Well, 3,500 recipes later,

Rick and Lee Dean, the paper's food editor,

picked 150 of the very best recipes for the Great Minnesota Cookie Book. Sally Swift talked to Rick about their best in show. Happy holidays, Rick Nelson. Happy holidays to you, Sally Swift.

So great to have you here. You are our

official launch to the holidays with this beautiful cookie book that you've put together.

Well, I'm delighted to hear that. It's the perfect way to start now that Dory Greenspan has made

cookies a fifth food group. And we're forever grateful to go for that.

We are forever grateful for that.

So tell us a little bit about how this cookie contest got started.

Well, I'm this kind of huge history nerd.

And in 2003, I discovered this archive at the newspaper.

And it had every copy of our food section dating back to the very first one on October 2nd, 1969.

And I started leafing through them. They were so fascinating.

Particularly in the 70s and the 80s, when there was so much reader interaction in the section, for example, there was one column called recipe requests where you could

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