Uncategorized – Page 50 – Peaceful Reader

For the LOVE of reading.

Last night I was sitting on the quiet side of the dance studio where my daughter gracefully dances and I was reading a book. I’d brought two books with me; The Light between oceans by M.L. Stedman and Donalyn Miller’s book The Book Whisperer. I’ve been trying to read Miller’s book for the last two years as I’ve had many people recommend it to me. I’ve even had one friend tell me that the book sounds just like me! With that said and after only reading the first few pages I came upon this quote which DOES describe me to a T!

“I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don’t-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person whom family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. (It was Johanna Spyri.)

My identity as a person is so entwined with my love of reading and books that I cannot separate the two. I am as much a composite of all the book characters I have loved as of the people I have met. I will never climb Mount Everest, but I have seen its terrifying majestic summit through the eyes of Jon Krakauer and Peak Marcello. Going to New York City for the first time, at forty, was like visiting an old friend I knew from E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. I wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hide in the bathroom until it closed, and look for angels. I know from personal experience that readers lead richer lives, more lives, than those who don’t read.”(10-11)

I’ll stop there but I could even go into the next paragraph which furthers her (and my) LOVE of reading! I was crushed when we visited this summer and never made it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but in fairness I was there years ago as a teenager. I ask my children to take a book with them wherever we go-you never know when you might be stuck in the car or an elevator or in line and have just a few minutes to read a page or two. I can’t wait to finish typing this post so I can read my school lunchtime book, Ungifted by Gordan Korman. What has you inspired?

Weekend warrior.

Woe is me! I have to spend half my day sitting around Barnes and Noble today, browsing through books. My daughter is in the local production of Junie B., Jingle bells, Batman smells! and they are performing from 1-3 to happy book shoppers. I’m sure I won’t leave empty handed and I wish I could take a handful of book bloggers with me! I can think of much worse places to wile away my afternoon.

A concentration camp would be top on that list after spending several hours in the middle of the night reading the end of Elizabeth Wein’s finely crafted historical fiction Rose under fire. Brutal, well-written, but brutal, brutal, brutal. The bonds she made in the women’s concentration camp carry you through the most horrible descriptions. I loved Code Name Verity and this is a companion novel, making use of the same war, different setting with kick-ass female characters/heroines and a few carry over characters. Both Wein’s novels and Junie B. have nothing in common except they all feature powerful young women.

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Rose explains to her boyfriend Nick her aspirations and frustrations:

Finally Nick said sympathetically, “What’s made you so
bloodthirsty?”

“I’m not bloodthirsty.
There’s no blood in a pilotless plane, is there? I’m a good pilot. I’ve probably been flying five years longer
than half the boys in 150 Wing. I flew with
Daddy from coast to coast across America when I was fifteen and I did all the
navigation. You’ve never flown a
Tempest, or a Mustang, or a Mark Fourteen Spitfire-I’ve flown them all, dozens
of times. They’re wasting me just
because I’m a girl! They won’t even let
us fly to France-they’re prepping men for supply and taxi to the front lines,
guys with hundreds’ fewer hours than me, but they’re just passing over the
women pilots. It isn’t fair.” (14)

Have a happy Saturday. Here in Iowa it is a gorgeous day outside and I have to finish cleaning up my garden.

Stolen by Lucy Christopher

I picked this book up from Scholastic about a year ago. Published in 2010, it is on an award list for Iowa this year and the premise had me intrigued. Also I was fascinated by the fact that the author wrote it as part of her doctoral program.

It proved to be as interesting as it’s synopsis led me to believe. Written as a letter to her captor Gemma pulls us directly into her story. Frustrated with her parents as they prepare for an international flight, Gemma takes off to buy herself a cup of coffee and gather her thoughts. While searching for the right change to hand the barista a stranger comes to her rescue offering to pay for the coffee with the right currency and fixes her cup up with a packet of sugar. By taking charge of the situation he wins her over with a few soft words and a drug in her drink. She is swept literally off her feet by Ty to a lone cabin in a remote Australian location. Gemma attempts to escape several times only to be brought back by Ty because nothing is near. He has the cabin stocked up with food and he plans to hide away from the world with Gemma by his side.

She’s never had a boyfriend and is not real close to the few friends she had back in London so Ty is able to pull her in because she’s not sure of her own emotions. There are parts of him that she is attracted to and yet she never fully forgets that he is her captor. I thought Lucy Christopher did an amazing job of portraying this precarious relationship with glimmers of kindness mixed with Gemma’s true reality of being stolen from her life; bad or good it was still her own life.

“So I followed you. I don’t know why really. I could say it was because I had nothing else to do except stare at four walls, or that I wanted to try escaping again, but I think there was more to it than that. When I was trapped in the house, it felt like I’d already died. At least when I was with you, it felt like my life mattered somehow…No, that’s not really it; it felt like my life was being noticed. It sounds weird, I know, but I could tell that you liked having me around. And that was better than the alternative, that feeling of emptiness that threatened to drown me every hour of being in that house.” (96)

The cover for this book and even the few inside illustrations that lead into the story are really well designed and make perfect sense once you turn the last page. My copy of Stolen has a nice award sticker on the front for the Michael L. Printz ALA honor book. If you haven’t picked this one up yet I recommend it. At 299 pages it won’t take you long…

Click her name to find her website: Lucy Christopher and see news about her new title, The Killing Fields.

Happy Halloween

Alice’s Mad Hatter

We were invited to a neighborhood party for Halloween-not quite our neighborhood but darn close. Everyone gathers together and eats first (soup, salad, and bread with a few delicious Halloween desserts tossed in). I tried to two soups and they were both good and Groovy Girl polished off most of a bowl of chicken noodle soup. It was fun to do something different in such a nice event.

Chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting.

Groovy Girl decided she wanted to make cupcakes to bring to the party. We searched online last night and found a perfect recipe and by that I mean a recipe she swooned over. We made the cake and frosting from Erica’s Sweet Tooth. Instead of the peanut butter cup on top she added one candy corn. She’s become quite an expert froster and the tiny cakes were a hit.

SuperGirl and the Mad Hatter

We’ve sorted the candy and have two large zip locks full, one of chocolate and one “other” and this year she even made a small bag of mom and dad candy-that includes Heath and Snickers bars. She truly has enough candy to last her a year. I hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween!

Mexican Meal made easy…

This enchilada recipe was a huge hit this week!

I adapted the enchiladas from The Accidental Vegetarian by Simon Rimmer (2004) which I wrote about in this post. While recipe searching through my own cookbooks to find something interesting to make for my old friends Barb, Robert, and their son Tracy and their exchange student from Guatemala I came upon this one that I wanted to try. I happened upon this recipe before I knew about the exchange student and figured I would stick with it. Maybe he would like America even more because of the mole sauce I whipped up!

It was fairly easy because I divided the tasks up into two different day’s worth of work. I planned on serving it Monday night-a busy night as Groovy Girl had rehearsal for her play and Barb, Robert, my husband and I were heading to a Bonnie Raitt concert. Saturday I made the mole sauce and Sunday afternoon I roasted the squash. Yes, the name was misleading to me as it is not pumpkin but butternut squash that headlines but i got over it. You will too.

Pumpkin Enchiladas with mole sauce
(feeds 6)

vegetable oil for roasting
2 butternut squash, peeled and cubed into 1-in cubes
15 oz can refried beans
freshly chopped cilantro leaves
1 red chili, chopped
12 soft flour or corn tortillas (I used corn)
salt and freshly ground black pepper
sour cream, lime wedges and fresh cilantro to serve

For the sauce:

10 red chilis
2 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp sesame seeds
2 T slivered almonds
5 black peppercorns
2-3 cloves
1 onion, sliced
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 T cocoa powder
vegetable oil for frying
15 oz can chopped tomatoes (I used last fresh ones from the garden instead)
pinch of cinnamon
sugar to taste
2.3 cup stock
3 1/2 best-quality dark chocolate (not unsweetened), grated

1. To make the sauce, put the chilies, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, almonds, peppercorns, and cloves in a mortar and pestle and crush. (This was fun!). Tip into a skillet and dry-fry for a minute or so until lightly charred.
2. In a separate pan, fry the onion, garlic, and cocoa in a little oil for 2 minutes.
3. Add the tomatoes and bring to a boil, then add all the dry-fried spices, the cinnamon, sugar, and stock, and cook for 25 minutes. Transfer to a blender and whiz until smooth. Turn out and fold in chocolate shavings.
4. Preheat the oven to 400*. Put some oil in a roasting pan and put in the oven to heat up. Tip the squash into the roasting pan, season well and roast for 40 minutes until soft.
5. Put the squash in a bowl, add the refried beans, cilantro, and red chile and stir well to mix.
6. Divide the mixture between the tortillas, roll up and cut the ends straight. Put in a baking dish, cover, and cook in the oven for about 12 minutes, until heated through.
7. To serve, put two tortillas on each plate and spoon over some of the sauce (it is heady so not too much). Serve with lime wedges, sour cream, and cilantro.

Having prepped the mole sauce and the squash mixture previously made this recipe very easy to throw together after work and before our concert.

This is linked to Beth Fish Reads weekend cooking meme. Click there to find many other food-related posts.
Have a peaceful week!

Weekend Cooking; Deep thinking about food.

Last night my husband and I went to an unusual play at our local university. The play based on the book, The American Way of Eating, by the same title by Tracie McMillan. The book was chosen as the school’s in-depth everyone reads book choice and the theatre department head decided that in celebration of that; they should workshop it into a play. From a very unorthodox beginning the play came together and was an amazing display of team work and artistic talent plus the audience members learned a lot of interesting facts.

Even though I haven’t read the book which is about Tracie’s journey to uncover what happens to produce from field to store to restaurant I get it. I’m the proverbial choir. I shop at the farmer’s market, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart or eat at chain restaurants or fast food. I did however not know enough or think about it enough what happens in the farm fields where undocumented or immigrants work. In Iowa I am familiar with disgusting meat plants that pluck workers from other countries in order to create an “affordable” work force. It is criminal how little they are paid for a long day’s work; back-breaking work and they are afraid to stand up for better conditions for fear of losing the little income they get. The play also touched on women’s rights and how easily those in charge take advantage of them.

I don’t know how to solve it beyond talking about it, writing about it, and encouraging folks to read her book and many others with similar themes about our broken food system. We want cheap food but at what cost and on who’s back are we stepping on to get garlic at a “rock-bottom price”.

Be aware. Be thoughtful. Investigate a lot. Question more.

This post is loosely linked to Weekend Cooking hosted by Candace at Beth Fish Reads. There you will find other foodies who love exploring recipes.

Other food-related news:

I created this delicious zucchini soup this past week for a quiet dinner for my husband and I. I plan to make this soup this week to use up swiss chard and zucchini. I made a mole sauce yesterday for a pumpkin enchilada dish I’m making this week for friends that I’m going to hear Bonnie Raitt with in concert. I made mini raspberry muffins for my book club kids-they asked for seconds.

Overall it has been a good food week here at our house.

And in preparation for winter I’ve been cleaning out the gardens by making two more batches of pesto with basil from my mother’s garden; it is beginning to freeze here at night and neither one of us wants to lose any basil. I think I’m also going to freeze mint leaves in cubes. I’m watching my zucchini and butternut squash plants carefully as I have several there to bring in.

Have a bountiful week!

Interesting YA titles

I finished both of these in September and what ties them together is love and the power of acceptance; something most humans desire. One uses that power and the other makes it into a curable disease.

The List by Siobhan Vivian:

Filled with the craziness of high school it brought back memories of how BAD it can be. I thought it said a lot though for all that high school student’s experience-being popular is weird and being unpopular is just as weird. If only all high school students could learn to be themselves; a very difficult concept because most teens have yet to truly find themselves as it often takes years to figure it all out.

Mount Washington H.S. has this tradition of a published list plastered all over the walls right before homecoming. The list shares the prettiest and the ugliest female student in each class. At any level it is difficult to appear on either side of the list; yet both sides display negative behavior because they are on the list.

Siobhan Vivian relays the stories of all eight young women affected by the list and we learn just how being a member of this small group changes them. In order to ignore the list you’d have to be a very mighty girl! I was not a brave soul in high school and would have found it heart-breaking to be even mentioned. Even the young women chosen for the pretties side struggle with how to keep up with the image they think every one expects. My first thoughts were that the list must be written by a guy or a group of guys. The ending left me shaking my head and praying for a second women’s movement!

A quote:

She lifts her chin a few degrees. ‘I’ve decided not to take a shower for a whole week.’

‘For real?’

‘Yup,’ she says, making the p pop. ‘I’m not showering, I’m not brushing my teeth, putting on deodorant, anything. I’m wearing these same clothes, not just the shirt, but the jeans, the socks, the underwear, the bra. My last shower was on Sunday night, before I went over to your house.’ She folds her arms. ‘I won’t participate in any kind of hygiene until Saturday night.’ It feels good to say her plan out loud. Now there can be no backing out.

‘What’s on Saturday night?’

‘The homecoming dance.’ It sounds so utterly ridiculous, but she keeps a straight face. ‘I’m going as smelly and disgusting as I can possibly make myself, dressed in these clothes.’

Milo laughs and laughs, but when Sarah doesn’t join, he stops. “Wait. You’re not serious.’

‘I am.’

‘Why are you letting that stupid list get to you? You hate the girls at this school, obviously for good reason. And now you want to show up at their dumb dance? This isn’t like you at all.’ (101)

Even the young women chosen for the pretties side struggle with how to keep up with the image they think every one expects. The ending left me baffled and praying for a second women’s movement!

Delirium by Lauren Oliver (2011):

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This is a glorious look at a future world where love has been deemed a disease. Can you imagine? They make a good case for why love could be perceived as a sickness. Lena is an orphan living in her aunt’s household waiting for her treatment that will prevent her from getting the disease. Many good plans fail to work out though and Lena meets someone that makes her feel all the effects of love which confuses her. Does she feel this way because she is now sick or are the people protecting her lying to her? As love often does her life becomes complicated as she balances her quiet life at home with her new desire to break the rules and see Alex as much as she can.

I enjoyed the relationship between Lena and her best friend Hana. They are good to each other but have a few struggles and conflicts throughout the story but in the end they find they can count on each other.

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I was named after Mary Magdalene, who was nearly killed from love: “So infected with deliria and in violation of the pacts of society, she fell in love with men who would not have her or could not keep her.” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).

We learned all about it in Biblical Science. First there was John, then Matthew, then Jeremiah and Peter and Judas, and many other nameless men in-between.

Her last love, they say, was the greatest: a man named Joseph, a bachelor all of his life, who found her on the street, bruised and broken and half-crazy from deliria. There’s some debate about what kind of man Joseph was-whether he was righteous or not, whether he ever succumbed to the disease-but in any case, he took good care of her. He nursed her to health and tried to bring her peace. (87-88)

I enjoyed how Oliver twisted our own biblical stories to create and re-enforce this new history and makes a convincing argument against love.

Both books were borrowed from my local library.

I’m reading Maggie’s Stiefvater’s sequel to The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, and love it. I downloaded it to my kindle to encourage myself to finish a book on this device. I love using it as a mini-computer and as a game device but have yet to finish a book on it. Dream Thieves will be my first and I’m proud to say I’m half way through or in Kindle-speak 48%.

Weekend Cooking; Guests!

If you’re having guests you need to plan a menu and that is one of my favorite chores. My in-laws arrived on Thursday and are staying through Tuesday. My husband directed a play in town, The Good Doctor by Neil Simon, and they’ve come to see it.

Making life easier for me my mom prepared lasagna at her house then brought it to my house and baked it so we could enjoy dinner before we all headed to the dress rehearsal of the show. We came back to the house after the play and had raspberry pie made by mother as well. I did make the fresh whipped cream for the top yet the truth is the women in my life really take care of me! Last night we ate at our new local Ginger Thai restaurant making Friday night’s meal easy on me again. Whew. And the taste sensation that is Ginger Thai doubled the food joy.

This morning, though, we shopped at our downtown Farmer’s Market-always beautiful, making preparations for a few meals we will cook together. We found two fat pumpkins, a bunch of kale, an eggplant, and a big head of broccoli to use. Our next stop was Cup of Joe’s, one of our favorite hangouts. We had a warm drink and played a quick game of Candyland.

Tonight we are having a roast chicken adapted from this Ree Drummond recipe. With the chicken I am serving this Israeli Couscous recipe I made this week. It is marinating into a perfect dish and I love that I will just have to toss it and serve it! My mother-in-law shared with me several new recipes that we are also going to try. She loves to cook as much as I do! One is a recipe for baked broccoli which looks simple yet delicious.

My mother-in-law makes amazing pies which prompted me to ask her if she would walk me through making a pie crust-I suck at making crusts but love pie. We turned that crust into a ground cherry apple pie using this recipe from a Minnesota blogger. Groovy Girl helped weave the lattice pie top. My grandmother had a patch of ground cherries and was an expert pie baker. I cannot wait to eat dinner tonight. The house smells like pie and soon the farm-fresh chicken will be roasting away stuffed with lemon, rosemary and butter. Hmmm.

{Wee baker with perfect pie!}

This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme. Click to her link for more food-related posts.

Weekend Cooking; Treats.

Wow. Two weeks flew by quickly.

And in that two weeks I’ve done some baking. Just because. Baking is good. Healing. A friend from work, my “egg man”, gave me a whole bushel of apples. Un-perfect, farm apples. Beauties that my camera won’t do justice. We’ve sliced them and had them as snacks yet their numbers didn’t diminish.

{Photo Source}

I remembered back to a recent Beth Fish Reads post about an apple cake that caught my eye. Oh my. I made it last week and that cake was delicious. The frosting-heavenly. I’m waiting patiently for a new occasion to arise just so I can make it again. Looking back at the post to link it I was reminded that it came from a King Arthur cookbook which makes perfect sense. Get some apples. Eat the apples because they are so good for you raw but then make the cake to reward yourself.

The next delicious treat I made is from Katie Workman’s fantastic book, The Mom 100 Cookbook. I needed a quick treat to make for my 5th grade book club. I searched through two or three books and happened upon this one on page 328 in the Bake Sale section. The kids loved them. Very rich chocolate taste without a lot of work. Perfect when you are making them at 9:00 at night.

Fudgy One-Pot Brownies
Makes 12 huge or 24 reasonably sized brownies

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, plus butter for greasing the pan
Nonstick cooking spray (I used coconut oil to smear around)
3 ozs unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar ( i know that IS a lot!)
1/2 tsp kosher or coarse salt
1 T. pure vanilla
3 large (farm) eggs
1 1/2 cup (unbleached KA) flour

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously butter a 13 x 9-in pan.

2. Place the butter and chocolate in a medium-sized saucepan over medium-low heat and let melt together, stirring until smooth. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the cocoa powder, sugar, and salt, then blend in the vanilla. Beat in the eggs one at a time, stirring to mix quickly so they don’t have a chance to cook at all before they are blended in. Blend in the flour.

3. Scrape the thick batter into the prepared baking pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake until the edges just begin to pull away from the sides of the pan and a wooden skewer or toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes.

4. Let the brownies cool in the pan on a wire rack. When completely cool, cut them into 12 or 24 squares. (The side note says it is better to cut these the next day if possible.)

Brownies were so good I had to make a second batch for home and to share with the in-laws arriving this week. I have to keep slapping my own hand from taking the crumbles.

This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme. Stop over and have a look at the many other food-related posts.

Weekend Cooking; Cupcakes!

Yesterday was the big birthday party. Each year a lot of thought goes into what to do for birthday parties at our house. When our older two were younger we had kite-flying parties, bowling parties, coffee shop soirees, and sleepovers. Groovy Girl takes it to a whole new level, naturally. Her themes have ranged from a penguin party (everyone wore black and white), a tie-dye party, a fairy garden party, and an art-themed party with a scavenger hunt downtown. This year she wanted it outside (this was NO surprise as all her parties are outside) and she wanted to bike, have a scavenger hunt, and do a craft. She called it an outdoor craft party.

This year’s scavenger hunt was in a nature area that all 5 girls biked to and instead of collecting the items from her dad’s long list they snapped a photo of it with her tablet. She turned the photos into a quick little slide show so they could “prove” they found the items. Everyone worked together to find the items and within an hour they rode their bikes back to me, waiting at the picnic shelter. We had pigs-in-a-blanket, salt & vinegar potato chips, grapes, and carrots.

{Groovy Girl is in the tutu!}

Their craft was button-making as my husband has a button-maker! They were able to pull objects from the area or magazines to create one-of-a-kind buttons. Each of them made 2-3 buttons and then we ate cupcakes.

I made the chocolate cupcakes from this Martha Stewart recipe. They were very easy and I would use this recipe again. Groovy Girl picked out a lemonade frosting from her So Sweet cookbook. We didn’t like it even before we put it on the cupcakes because we didn’t know what else to do. She was frosting them Saturday morning right before the party. I want to try the recipe again with much less shortening and more marshmallow fluff.

As it was the frosting tasted like plastic with that weird shortening aftertaste. NOT what we were looking for; plastic tasting lemonade. She did decorate them nicely with lemon zest and a tiny straw end poking out like they could drink it-which, of course, a few of them tried to do. We have a few remaining cupcakes from the dozen and I plan to knock off the frosting, dollop some of the real whipped cream leftover from her pancake birthday breakfast and enjoy the cupcakes anyway.

In case you want to give it a go:

lemonade filling {73-74, Sur La Table’s So Sweet)

1 1/2 cups vegetable shortening
1 1/4 cups marshmallow cream
1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp lemon oil (I didn’t use)
1 tsp lemon juice (I used about a Tablespoon instead)
1 package (.23 oz) lemonade drink mix (optional) (we used it)

Place the shortening and the cream in the bowl of a stand-up mixer with the paddle attachment. Cream them together on medium speed for 4 minutes. Use a rubber spatula to scrape the sides of the bowl. Place the powdered sugar in the bowl, starting on low speed to incorporate. Increase the speed to medium and beat for an additional 4 minutes. Add the lemon ingredients and beat 4 more minutes.

This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme. Click over and read other food-related posts.

Happy Sunday!