Lifestyle
An immersive museum in Kansas City allows kids to explore their favorite books
Lindsey Anderson sits down to read Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina to her children Orion, 6, Arthur, 4, and Thora Hoke, 1, inside the exhibit inspired by the book inside The Rabbit hOle, an immersive museum dedicated to children’s literature, in North Kansas City, Mo.
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Lindsey Anderson sits down to read Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina to her children Orion, 6, Arthur, 4, and Thora Hoke, 1, inside the exhibit inspired by the book inside The Rabbit hOle, an immersive museum dedicated to children’s literature, in North Kansas City, Mo.
Katie Currid for NPR
In children’s museums around the country, there are a lot of similar exhibits: the water exploration table, the kid-sized grocery store, the colorful jungle gym. But at The Rabbit hOle, an innovative and immersive museum dedicated to children’s literature that opened on March 12 in North Kansas City, Mo., you won’t find those things, which is exactly what co-founder Pete Cowdin intended.
“There’s so much repetition, there’s so much sameness, because most of the exhibits and most of the museums around the country for children are built by a handful of design companies,” Cowdin says. “All those things are fine, but I do think that there’s room for a different kind of experience.”
Cowdin co-founded The Rabbit hOle with his wife, Deb Pettid, after years as booksellers and owners of a beloved Kansas City children’s bookstore, the Reading Reptile. Now, the two are leading a revolutionary space in a 150,000-square-foot former warehouse, employing over 20 full-time artists and fabricators to bring children’s books to life in interactive exhibits.
Casey Sackin explores the entrance to the museum.
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Casey Sackin explores the entrance to the museum.
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A mouse on a bike from the book Anatole, by Eve Titus, rides around a display of Paris.
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A mouse on a bike from the book Anatole, by Eve Titus, rides around a display of Paris.
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“We want to bring more critical culture to children’s literature,” Cowdin says, “not in a way to tear it down, but to call up the things that are actually taking away from the art of picture book making or the art of creating literature for young people.”
The museum has the rights to over 70 works from the last century of children’s literature, and works with the writers and illustrators or the estates of those books to bring them to life in unique and interactive exhibits. The museum features exhibits based on well-known children’s classics like Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, Curious George by H.A. and Margret Rey, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, and, perhaps most popular, a recreation of the actual room from Goodnight Moon, the book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, where children and adults alike can explore the great green room.
Neon rabbit signs adorn the top of the building housing The Rabbit hOle.
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Neon rabbit signs adorn the top of the building housing The Rabbit hOle.
Katie Currid for NPR
Madelyn Williams, 20 months, leads her mother, Nancy, through the kitchen from Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey.
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Madelyn Williams, 20 months, leads her mother, Nancy, through the kitchen from Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey.
Katie Currid for NPR
But the museum also features lesser-known children’s books, such as Perez and Martina, a story based on a Puerto Rican folk tale by Pura Belpré and illustrated by Carlos Sanchez, or Uptown, by the late John Steptoe, which brings a storefront from Harlem to life, created in collaboration with Steptoe’s children.
“It’s our mission to inspire the reading lives of children and adults,” says Emily Hane, The Rabbit hOle’s development and grant manager. “We want to be a place where kids can really discover the types of stories that they like that they’ve maybe never been exposed to before — whether it’s because they’ve never seen a picture book with a kid who looks like them, or heard cultural stories that might resonate with their own household.”
Left: Cal Kreiling, 16 months, watches a mouse on a bike from the book Anatole. Right: Parker Crawford, 18 months, knocks on the door to a tree inside the museum.
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Left: Cal Kreiling, 16 months, watches a mouse on a bike from the book Anatole. Right: Parker Crawford, 18 months, knocks on the door to a tree inside the museum.
Katie Currid for NPR
In the museum, patrons enter through a burrow and rabbit hole, and can play in the kitchen from Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal, or take a nap against the tree from Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale. They can then pick up the book the exhibit inspired and enjoy the pages they’ve seen brought to life. Cowdin says kids are really the leaders in the space.
“We’re not telling parents and children how to use the space and what they should [do], we’re asking them to explore, and to find the books that are there and to find the exhibits and to experience exhibits and then to come together again around the book to read the book,” says Cowdin. “The whole goal of the project is to bring young people — but also parents and educators — closer to the story.”
The museum was inspired by places like the City Museum in St. Louis or art installation Meow Wolf, which make art-forward spaces that don’t have a “right” or “wrong” way to interact with the exhibits.
Patrons peruse books inside the bookstore of The Rabbit hOle.
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Patrons peruse books inside the bookstore of The Rabbit hOle.
Katie Currid for NPR
Left: Fabricator Gen Goering paints the walls of an exhibit before the museum opened to the public. Right: Rabbit feet and arrows mark the sidewalks outside of The Rabbit hOle.
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Left: Fabricator Gen Goering paints the walls of an exhibit before the museum opened to the public. Right: Rabbit feet and arrows mark the sidewalks outside of The Rabbit hOle.
Katie Currid for NPR
“If all we did was make a beautiful place for children, it would be rare, honestly,” says Cowdin. “We’ve done more than that and we’ll continue to build on that.”
On top of the book exhibits, The Rabbit hOle also features a bookstore and will soon host author talks and open a room for making crafts based on the museum’s exhibits. The museum also has plans to open a resource library for educators and scholars, and will also have rotating exhibit spaces and a story and print lab, with room to host residencies for authors and illustrators.
“Whenever you’re talking about children’s culture, there is this [idea of], ‘Oh, it’s good enough. It’s for kids, you know, just make it cheap. They don’t really deserve anything beautiful’,” says Hane. “And that’s the exact opposite of how The Rabbit hOle feels. We believe that kids deserve something beautiful. Yeah, it’s going to be durable. Yeah, we’re going to be able to sterilize it and clean it and everything. But just because it’s for children, doesn’t mean it is a lesser art form.”
A team of fabricators work on the exhibit inspired by the book Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor in January, before the museum opened to the public.
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A team of fabricators work on the exhibit inspired by the book Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor in January, before the museum opened to the public.
Katie Currid for NPR
The museum features an exhibit bringing to life the room from the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd.
Katie Currid for NPR
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Katie Currid for NPR
The museum features an exhibit bringing to life the room from the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd.
Katie Currid for NPR
Katie Currid is a photographer based in Kansas City.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?
Answer: Screech owl –> howl
Winner
Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks perform onstage during day two of the Boston Calling Music Festival at Boston City Hall Plaza on September 26, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)
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