Pope Groan

My book group met last night to discuss Pope Groan, sorry Pope Joan. (Mary Jean came up with the pun after tolerating one of my rants. She's good with puns that way.)

I was relieved that I wasn't the only person who disliked the book, though perhaps I did express my disparagement more vociferously than other, more controlled, members (blame the copious quantity of wine consumed...).

Rather than spend any more time rehashing this unworthy book, I'll move on to what was, yet again, a splendid meal. Much of the book was set in Rome, so we (loosely) prepared dishes of an Italian-ish theme.

Halla brought yummy cheese and bread for us to eat (and to soak up the red wine that some of us were putting away at an alarming rate) before dinner. The group favorite was the drunken goat--a semi-soft goat cheese that is soaked in red wine.

Cheese--decimated by the barbarians

Sarah hosted and treated us to Artichokes stuffed with Sausage and Feta with a lemon-egg sauce:

Sarah demonstrates proper artichoke technique.

The artichokes were served with Marilyn's wonderful Cesar salad and Meg's roast vegetables:

Another groaning plate of bliss.

And then for dessert we had pine nut honey gelato (which I made) and Lea's homemade pizzelle:

See the beautiful bowl? Sarah made a set of these. I have such talented friends.

I'm going to blog more at length about the gelato in the near future after I have leisure to ponder (and research) the nature of gelato-ness.

Honest Pretzels

Last week in the midst of some pre-retreat excitement, I had the privilege of cooking with one of my favorite food-enthusiasts. He may only reach to my sternum, but in sheer excitement for the kitchen, he is a giant. I speak of Saul Vielmetti, the boy who gives me hope for the palate of the next generation.

While pesto is among Saul's favorite foods (and mine) we were cooking with my far less-adventurous-eater son, Ian, and so together we made Honest Pretzels.

Ian and Saul man-handling (aka kneading) the dough while Fiona (paw to the left) experiments with the gravity properties of flour...

How do you tell an "Honest" pretzel from a "Dishonest" pretzel? Beats the hell out of me. But that was the title of the recipe from the terrific kid's cooking book of the same name authored by Molly Katzan (yes, that Molly Katzan. Now that she isn't churning out Moosewood cookbooks, she is cooking with the height-challenged set).

We already own Pretend Soup, her first and most simple kid's cookbook (a gift for Ian from Saul--see how he is spreading the gospel of good eating among his friends?) and we obtained Honest Pretzels from the library. Pretend Soup is to credit for (re) introducing Ian to beans (bean and cheese quesadillas), getting him to try a banana for the first time in 3 years (the title recipe, pretend soup) and encouraging Ian to sound excited about vegetables (his actual consumption of vegetables lags behind his enthusiasm for reading recipes about them, but hopefully the gap will close over time).

Honest Pretzels is intended for ages 8 and up and is a bit more challenging, both in how the recipes are written (more words, fewer pictures) and in the techniques and coordination required. But with adult help handling the dangerous stuff (knives, ovens, boiling water, etc.) the recipes are quite do-able. And Ian and Saul are (allow me to brag a bit here) both incredible readers who can read the whole book cover to cover. (Ok, now that I've exhibited some of that insufferable parent pride I'll try to keep it under wraps for the rest of this entry.)

First we mixed up a simple bread dough in the food processor, turned it out on the counter top and, (after yet another hand-washing necessitated by my children's fondness for nose picking) allowed the kids to finish the kneading process.
While the dough proofed, there was a break for wrestling/train playing/general mayhem among the short folks, and a flour containment project for me.

An hour later we reconvened in the freshly swept kitchen and started the shaping process. We started with the conventional pretzel shape and then got creative. There was a snail (Saul's mom, Deb), a little person (Debbie Sobeloff, another adult friend attending the dough festivities), some misshapen blobs (Fiona), and two "A"s from Ian and Saul since it is a letter that is in both of their names.

After shaping, the pretzels get boiled for about a minute in a big pot of water, the same preparation as a bagel undergoes. We discovered that pretzels made of one piece of dough (a circle, the snail) survived the immersion bath far better than those pieced together out of little pieces of dough. My teddy bear pretzel lost a few appendages in his bath.

Then the boiled dough was placed on a baking sheet, sprayed with water (to make them crusty rather than squishy) and baked for 20 minutes. Half way through I pulled them out and spritzed them with water again (the kids got to do the initial spraying which, much to my surprise, mostly landed on the dough). We decided not to sprinkle them with salt. Despite my love of most foods saline, I don't quite trust my kids with moderating the salt flow to an edible quantity--if the salt was approached even remotely how they approached the flour, we'd be stuck dumping the finished product out for the birds to consume.

There were a wide array of shapes from which to choose.

The finished warm pretzels made a fine (vegetable free) lunch. Ian and Saul decided to dip theirs in peanut butter, the grown ups enjoyed them smeared with the goat cheese Deb brought with her, and Fiona discovered that cream cheese is a fine interactive art medium:
We'll definitely be making these again, though next time I'll try to sneak in a little whole wheat flour. The unfortunate facet of cooking with two excellent readers is they can tell when you "cheat" the recipe a bit.

The Things They Did (and Ate) with Photos

(My apologies to Tim O'Brien and his wonderful story "The Things They Carried" for the shamless rip-off of the title of this entry...)

What I wrote:
The first evening and day, I worked on the Valeska material—wrote a new opening scene, did lots of editing of existing material, tried to do some global chapter organization and mapping. No great epiphanies, but solid work.

Second day, I wasn’t in the mood to spend more time with The Gert—she’s pretty intense and kind of exhausting to be with all the time (which does not bode well for my ever being able to finish the book nor for my expectation that a reader would want to spend a chunk of their time with her story…). I beat myself up about this for a little while, then looked out the window at the exquisitely blue sky and yellow leaves and decided to forgive myself for being weak and lazy and instead turned to ideas for some articles that I want to write for a local rag that are about food and yarn. I had a lovely time sketching out these ideas and realized that I'm much better at it than fiction...

Ami worked on a story I can't wait to read, set in Rome. And Sarah worked on both a short story and started three new poems; one in particular is about a dog, and smoke and sleep that I'm hoping she'll share.

Sarah, looking appropriately poetical.

What I read:
I re-read most of Rosina Lippi’s Homestead and just loved it to death again for its subtlety, its grace and forgiveness, its inner turmoil and outer peace. I didn’t bring any books with me that I hadn’t read yet because I know how easily I can get sucked into a new story and not be able to pull myself away from it. But I did read some new stuff thanks to the books that Ami brought with her. I read some poems from Carl Dennis’ Ranking the Wishes. Really wonderful poems and the perfect finite way to remind my brain about the concentrated power of language. Also I read a few stories from the short story anthology You’ve Got to Read This, a lovely book in which 35 contemporary writers introduce stories that they love. My favorite was Alice Munroe’s story “Labor Day Dinner” (which can be found in her collection The Moons of Jupiter.) The introducer was David Leavitt (whose novel The Lost Language of Cranes and short story collection Family Dancing I have read and enjoyed) and he drew my attention to Munroe’s effortless shifts in point of view. I love Munroe’s stories anyway, the characters are complex, everyday life is made significant without resorting to the contrast of catastrophe, and the endings of the stories are graceful. But it was great to be encouraged to look at the craft of her writing too. I also read a Lars Gustafsson story (introduced by Charles Baxter) “Greatness Strikes Where it Pleases” that I loved and I’m going to have to track down the collection it came from called Stories of Happy People.

What I ate:
This is the point at which people are going to hate me—that is, if you have a jealous streak you might start feeling a little green right now. And if you don’t feel envious, well, you are a bigger person than I am.

I’ll go chronologically. The first evening we opened a bottle of Azagador red wine ($9 at Morgan & York, my favorite affordable bottle from their wine sale last year) and laid out the following to eat in front of the fire in the wood stove:

Sliced sourdough bread, shards of amazing parmesan (Morgan & York again), a round of aged ash-coated goat cheese which we combined with orange-fig preserves, and green olives marinated in citrus and fennel.

Saturday breakfast was leek quiche (leeks from the garden, eggs from the chickens on the farm), orange date muffins, baked apples with maple syrup and pecans and fresh oj.

A benevolent chicken.

Saturday lunch was some lovely salami studded with fennel seeds, bread, cornichons, more olives, and some fresh fruit (kiwi, strawberries, blackberries and pineapple).

For Saturday dinner, we roasted a boneless leg of lamb (obtained at Trader Joe’s frozen and marinated and pretty damn good especially for the price), roast red-skin potatoes, salad made with the last of my homegrown lettuce and the last of Sarah’s home grown tomatoes, a bottle of appropriately titled Ars Poetica red wine and then, after a significant pause and some time outside rocking on the bench swing and taking in the night air, a desert composed of outrageously rich Mexican Chocolate brownies with hot fudge sauce and ice cream.

Oh my. I'd like to dive in and roll around in this...

Sunday breakfast was fresh cooked eggs from the aforementioned chickens (over easy) and a still-warm brioche loaf (mmm—more eggs and butter), with a fresh fruit salad and more oj.

Just look at that yolk! No color enhancement has been done to this photo.

Sunday lunch was another salami/cheese/olive/cornichon/tomato grazing combo.

A plate of pleasure.

And then we had to return to the real world, albeit with very full and happy tummies, and quite a few leftovers.

What I knitted:
Nothing. I resisted the urge to bring any knitting along so that when I wasn’t writing or cooking or reading, I was still. I need to practice being still though my fingers got a little itchy at times, especially when I was watching Sarah knit a-sweater-that-I-covet with beautiful leaf-green silk alpaca blend.

Sarah, looking poetical even when she isn't writing poetry.

Bad Coffee Machine Karma

Ahhhhh. That would be the sound of a well-rested, revived mind.

Stress makes my brain feel like a hot air balloon that has sprung a leak—there’s a hiss in the background of the air escaping and my thoughts are in panic mode trying to prevent a catastrophic crash If I can just get the damn balloon down to land, I’ll be ok. But unfortunately we’re flying high (yes we, you didn’t think I went up in a hot air balloon by myself did you? Oh no, one must compound the stress by bringing along your nearest and dearest all of whom are under the mistaken impression that you are a capable balloon pilot, or flyer, or floater, or whatever) and while I’m trying to figure out how to control a vehicle that has no steering mechanism, I’m simultaneously having that urge I get whenever I’m in a high vulnerable place to throw myself over the edge like a lemming.

Sounds like fun, eh?

It is high praise for all the elements of this weekend (company, place, task at hand, food) that rather than leaking hot air, my mind feels like it is doing the kind of deep yoga breathing where you inhale through your nose (noisily, as I remember, Mr. Snuffaluffagus-style) and fill up your lungs, poofing your belly out, and then slowly, completely without a panic-y leaky feeling, let the air out.

It is quite telling when the only thing that started the hot-air-hiss in my head was a small kitchen appliance.

The "I-hate-Kate-coffee-machine"

It looked like an innocent coffee maker. New-ish, impeccably clean (the entire kitchen here is so clean it looks like no one has ever used it—no burnt grease spots or mysterious crud around the burners, a bright white fridge and microwave, etc), holding the promise of early morning coffee and a few hours of productive writing before breakfast (which was an amazing leek quiche, orange date muffins, baked apples with maple syrup and pecans and fresh o.j. all delivered by the gracious proprietor to our kitchen. Burp.)

Morning is without a doubt my best time to write. Sometimes I can get a post-tea afternoon buzz going but at dawn I am much less self-critical and rigid (take one guess when I’m writing this?). But I am not a pure enough soul to be able to write without one cup of morning coffee, preferably half a cup of strong brew (or two espresso shots) with half a cup of hot milk. If no hot milk is available then I’ll take it black, thank you.

My first attempt at making the required beverage wasn’t dramatic, it was just weak as dirty dishwater, a substance Sarah’s husband calls “burnt water”. I have some difficulty adapting to new coffee makers and different grinds and types of coffee—I know how to make what I like with my own equipment but don’t know how to get what I want when faced with anything even slightly different. This one was a basket rather than a cone and the coffee was from a bag of Starbucks pre-ground house blend that the B and B owner left for us (bless her again for not leaving Folgers—one of the dangers of venturing into rural Michigan is the coffee that passes for acceptable—Starbucks was far better than what I had expected) so I wasn’t that surprised when my first attempt was undrinkable. First I dumped a ton of coffee into the filter, and then figured I was overreacting so I scooped half of it out again, started the machine and left it to go start a fire in the wood burning stove in living room. (Side note: loved the stove. Want one.)

The "I-love-Kate-and-Kate-loves-me" wood stove

The resulting coffee was weak and disgusting so down the drain it went. I refilled the water reservoir, emptied and re-filled the basket and tried again with a hell of a lot more coffee. Started it up and went back to the stove to admire my excellent fire-karma.

I was so pleased with the crackling wood that I didn’t hear the sputtering machine, but when I went back I saw that something was seriously wrong—a black puddle oozed over the countertop, there were eruptions over the side of the basket dripping down the (formerly) pristine white exterior of the machine, and there was the sour smell of coffee boiling and burning on the hot plate. I hadn’t jammed the pot under the basket quite hard enough so while a bit of the oily brew made it into the pot; the rest had backed up in the filter basket and overflowed.

In my own house this would not have been such a big deal, but then in my own house the contrast would not have been as stark due to the fact that nothing in my kitchen ever looked so clean before I came along and ruined it.

I managed to salvage a half a cup of barely drinkable coffee (it was chewy coffee since a quantity of the grounds had found their way into the pot) and made myself drink it before attempting to clean the evil machine. It was pretty clear that this machine hated my guts by then because what should have been a relatively basic clean-up kept getting worse and worse as I tried harder and harder. I managed to get coffee grounds into the damn water reservoir which, unless I could get them out, would mean that I had plugged up and effectively broken the machine.

Thankfully Ami and Sarah were still asleep and I didn’t have witnesses to the absurd wrestling match that ensued. Half a roll of paper towels and a good deal of anxious sweat and quiet swearing later, I was able to leave the coffee maker in approximately the state I found it.

The next morning I didn’t dare tamper with the damn thing. I removed its basket, boiled water on the stove and used it like a cone drip to make one half cup of strong, non-chewy, and acceptable coffee, and only poured boiling water on my hand once...

Next time I’m bringing my little one-cup cone filter (which has never misbehaved).

But hey, if that is the only stress one has experienced in two whole days it has been a pretty damn good weekend.

More to come soon on the 4 Obsessions details (what I wrote, we read, ate and knit).

Robots Forever!

Yea! Jess Hutch has her knitted robot pattern booklet (and other knitted toys) ready for purchase! Yes, I've already purchased mine.

And in other knitting news, I'm patiently mattress stitching the sleeves onto the body of my Ribby cardigan. Steam blocking was not a great success--it smoothed out the seams enough for me to do the stitching, but I'm going to have to wet block the sweater in order to release the sleeves from their corset-like tightness. Steam just wasn't up to the challenge of my tight stitches. I was hoping to avoid that wet-sheep smell in my bathroom while it dries, but ah well.

Excitement in the air

This coming weekend is my writing retreat--I may be more excited about this weekend than about my recent trip to Europe. It is one thing to spend time alone with your dear man, it is another thing entirely to have some time alone with your own mind.

All week I've been thinking about writing--what I want to accomplish, what writing techniques and principles I want to keep in mind, digging up my "voice" from where it has been buried since last Memorial Day weekend (when Brian took the rugrats away so I could have a weekend of fiction writing at home).

Of course, I'm also thinking about the food.

I'm lucky enough to be spending this retreat weekend with two other food-loving writers, Ami and Sarah. Breakfast will be provided by the B and B at which we are staying, but that leaves two lunches, a dinner and lots of good, sustaining writing snacks to plan. The food has to be nice enough to please three food-loving people without taking lots of time to prepare since we don't want to cut into writing time. I'm assuming a trip to Big 10 will cover the snack/lunch requirement of good cheese, cured meats, olives, and other small luxuries. But I'm still contemplating dinner and would love any suggestions. Boneless leg of lamb keeps coming to mind since it can be chucked in the oven and left alone for a while without lots of fiddling.

Other good news: I finished Pope Joan yesterday (ugh ugh ugh--excruciating to the bitter end) so it is out of my house now. My sympathies to Lea who is now in possession of the copy and has to read it before our book group meets next week. Last night in a fit of insomnia, I read a third of Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, which I am loving. She has such a sharp voice and dark humor that even when writing about tragedies (the book concerns three different tragedies/mysteries that one private investigator has to try and solve) the book never veers into melodrama. I loved Atkinson's first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It also had a vague mystery about it in that the main character, Ruby, suspects that something has been hidden from her, in this case a buried family secret. Case Histories is a bit more straight forward without the footnotes and asides that revealed information very gradually. But then she's taking on a rather different task twisting together three disparate storylines.

Southwest-ish Salade Compose

This wouldn't be a salade compose that you'd find in France, but it was damn tasty last night:
That is the last of the late season lettuce from my garden topped with grilled flank steak, cumin roasted sweet potatoes and a corn/red pepper/cilantro/lime salad.

I'm currently having a love affair with Arbor Farm's beef supplier. The old Arbor Farms used to depress the hell out of me--the produce was tired, the bulk stuff always looked dusty, and the only meat they had was frozen. The new Arbor Farms is much better. Their produce quality has improved ten-fold (though the only scallions they had the other day had started to go slimy...), the store is much brighter and cleaner, and they have a terrific grass fed beef provider. The meat tastes great and, this is my favorite part, is vacuum sealed so you can buy it and don't have to use it immediately, nor do you have to freeze it. I bought the flank steak before I had that nasty stomach bug last week and if I had bought it anywhere else, well, it would have gone bad by the time I was well enough to use it.

Arbor Farms is also on my side of town. It does not provide the satisfaction (nor the temptation) of shopping at Whole Paycheck across town--Whole Paycheck can provide the gourmet indulgences and Arbor Farms (wisely) doesn't try to compete with Zingerman's or Big 10. But Arbor Farms does have good food and far fewer of the frustrations of Whole Paycheck (that hellacious parking lot, the snarky checkout workers--though snarky in a "I've been trained to be cheerful so I'll sneer at you and your two pain-in-the-ass kids through my forced smile", and those prices!)

Ami and John joined us for dinner and they brought along three bottles of red wine for us to review--they want to buy a case for an upcoming fire-related event they are hosting so we opened them all and I thought they all were pretty darn good.
My favorite was the Arancio, a Sicilian Syrah. The Altaona was more Cabernet in strength and the Vina Alarba was juicier, more Zinfandel-like. Ami bought all three at Village Corner and I've got to head over there to get some too. I don't know if you can see the number on the price tag in the above photo, but that Altaona was only $6.99!!

There is still a lot of wine left in the three bottles which will come in handy today since Sarah introduced me to the idea of a Pope Joan drinking game.

Every time you find one of the following phrases used
"her white-gold hair"
"his/her malevolent/malicious smile"
you take a drink.

To this I will add my own contribution, every time you find a historical inaccuracy or bit of ridiculousness, take a drink.

By the above rules, I would have been sloshed this morning while in the 140 page vicinity since one of the above conditions was met on almost every page.

Yes, I have started a Pope Joan crimes notebook. It is the only way to tolerate reading it. Rather than gnashing my teeth, I gleefully take up my pen and note down the incident. Petty of me? Oh yes. Fun? Yes indeedy do.

A long post with at least one good rant

I've finally kicked that nasty stomach bug and can write about food (and other things) now that I'm not huddled in a little self-pitying ball.

Let's start with something pleasant, namely last night's dessert:
That's a modest portion (tummy still not up to gluttony) of apple crumble with homemade Cinnamon Ice Cream. The apple crumble was just a basic combo of apples tossed with a little brown sugar and lemon juice and topped with flour/butter/white sugar streusel, baked until the apples started to caramelize a bit. I purposely left the cinnamon out of the crumble so that the ice cream could provide the punch. And punch it did! This is terrific ice cream (I'm now imagining it in a Mexican sundae sort of combo with dark chocolate and toasted almonds). I modified a recipe so it had less sugar and evaporated milk rather than half and half. And I appreciate that it only has two eggs in it (I made rum raisin ice cream for my dad's 70th birthday last month and it had 8 eggs in it which was too much for me. The raisins and rum were good, but I thought the base was just too eggy.)

I used really good cinnamon in this ice cream-- China Cassia Cinnamon that I ordered from Penzeys which is intense and almost sweet on its own. (And which I will no longer have to mail order since they recently opened up a store in suburban Detroit).


Cinnamon Ice Cream

1 can evaporated milk
1 C heavy cream
2 eggs
1/2 C sugar
1/2 t salt
1 t vanilla
2 t good ground cinnamon

In a saucepan over medium-low heat, stir together the sugar and evaporated milk and 1/2 C of the heavy cream. When the mixture begins to simmer, remove from heat, and whisk half of the mixture into the eggs. Whisk quickly so that the eggs do not scramble. Pour the egg mixture back into the saucepan, and stir in the rest of the heavy cream. Continue cooking over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a metal spoon.

Remove from heat, and whisk in vanilla and cinnamon. (The cinnamon will float to the top in annoying little blobs and refuse to blend. Don't worry about it--it'll get incorporated when in the ice cream maker). Cool to room temperature then refridgerate until chilled.

Pour cooled mixture into an ice cream maker, and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.


While we are on the subject of food, here is a photo of my favorite main course while in Europe:

Choucroute aux trois Poissions

We ate at a traditional Alsatian restaurant while in Strasbourg and I had a chance to try a choucroute that was loaded with fish rather than meat. The traditional choucroute has chunks of varied meat products (think plain and/or smoked ham, sausages, and if you order the Choucroute Royale, a big old cow tongue plopped in the center. I avoided the Royale version...).

By the time this meal rolled around I was having a bit of a pork overload, so I was interested to try the fish version and it was terrific. On the bed of sauerkraut simmered in wine with a little bacon (so not entirely pork free) were some small shrimp, a piece of salmon, a piece of monkfish and a piece of haddock, and a few potatoes. Then there was a nice puddle of beurre blanc and some lovely garnishes--fresh red currants and a chunk of fresh fig and a few slices of nicely ripe tomatoes. For me the garnishes were what elevated the dish beyond merely pleasant--the bite of red currant really cut through the fat in the dish, and the proportions were perfect. The currant/fig/tomato didn't compete for attention, but provided just enough contrast so I didn't go into richness overload.

I was pretty darn full after consuming that plate of cabbagy fishy goodness though, so I wasn't able to take on any of the outrageous looking desserts on the menu. Instead I retreated to my favorite clean dessert--three scoops of sorbet, which I have already stated, the French seem to be able to way better than we do.

Cassis (black currant), peach and lemon sorbets

Now on to my rant which manages to incorporate books and food--I am loving David Maine's Fallen which is good because I'm hating Pope Joan with a passion. Right now I'm rewarding myself for slogging through 100 pages of Joan with about 10 pages of Fallen, kind of like a book antidote to literary toxin. Pope Joan contains horribly clumsy writing, annoyingly predictable scenes and worst of all, some incredibly sloppy factual errors. Donna Cross has clearly researched the history of the church in this period and knows her Latin, but the woman does not have a feel for the every day life that actually brings a historical novel to life. I present to you a factual error on page 30 that had me reeling when I read it:

"The meal was splendid, the most lavish the family had ever prepared for a guest. There was a haunch of roast salted pork, cooked till the skin crackled, boiled corn and beetroot, pungent cheese, and loaves of crusty bread freshly baked under the embers."

There is one MAJOR and one minor thing wrong with the above meal. This scene is in 822 AD near Mainz in what is now Germany and the family is eating boiled corn. Corn was not introduced to the European continent until after the Age of Exploration to the New World, say the 1400's. I will grant you that the word "corn" could be used in its Old English sense as a "grain with the seed still in". If the book was better written, I'd probably cut the author some slack here and assume that she was using the word in such a way, but since it isn't I'm going to keep my rant as is. The minor wrong? I've never heard of salt pork being roasted much less developing a crackling skin. You need a fresh pork roast to get crackling.

I'm more sensitive to mistakes like these because I've been spoiled lately reading Sara Donati--her research is thorough and brings the past alive incredibly well. While reading her books I have made corn bread (and corn muffins with blueberries) more times than I can count--when a book inspires me to go to the kitchen to recreate a little bit of it in my own world, well, that's effective writing. Yes, when I read Jane Austen I drink a lot of tea and when I read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, my kitchen smelled of ginger, garlic, cumin and tumeric (it's a long book--1488 pages--so we were eating primarily daal and raita for a couple of weeks) .

Donati researches the hell out of her settings and yet manages to incorporate the research without hitting you over the head with it--something not easy to do. Most people can access accurate information these days if they care to, but getting it into a fictional story without having it stand out as a Self-Consciously-Researched-Moment is much harder and Donati is very good at getting the information in there without making you feel like you are reading a text book. Wondering about how people used to deal with mosquitoes? Bear grease or an ointment made with penny royal. Want to learn crop planting techniques? Use corn as planting support for vine plants like beans and squash (and the beans will also revitalize the soil by putting the nitrogen back). And if you want to know how early vaccinations against small pox were done, just read the third book in her wilderness series, Lake in the Clouds. Not only will you learn the technique, but you'll come away with a feel for the process.

I really liked Lake in the Clouds, even more than Dawn on a Distant Shore (Book 2). I didn't mind leaving Elizabeth and focusing the book on Hannah--it was clear at the end of Book 2 that we were heading that way. Besides, I have a soft spot for fiction that deals with medical techniques (as I mentioned while raving about Saturday by Ian McEwan). There was only one teeny weeny thing that put up a red flag for me (and again, it has to do with food)--after Hannah and Curiosity have spent the night at Kitty's death bed, Hannah returns to her family at Lake in the Clouds with the news and with her she brings Curiosity's fresh baked bread. Bread takes a while to make and I just don't think Curiosity had time to be kneading, shaping and baking loaves while attending the death bed. Maybe if her daughter Daisy had made it, or maybe if they were biscuits, I'd believe it. But this is a pretty minor complaint when compared to all the details that Donati gets right, not to mention a thumping good story (unlike the clumsy prose and contrived scenes of Joan).

On the knitting front, I'm pleased to report that the two-year-old is no longer scared of my gloves:
Shortly after flapping around the house she stuffed the gloves in her teapot and tried to serve them to me as a beverage...so maybe they are a little fruity.

I'm stuck at the point of dealing with blocking the Ribby Cardigan and then doing the zipper band and collar (roll-neck version for me). I hate blocking so this time I'm going to try the steam blocking method that Bonne Marie describes in her Ribby Cardigan notes. I need to go get some distilled water for the iron to do this and keep forgetting...

I decided I needed a little lower stress knitting so I started a really basic pair of socks to gift to someone for Christmas--no fancy pattern, just some Knitpics Parade self-striping yarn in plum done up in the most basic way. I'd forgotten how relaxing knitting can be when you don't continually push yourself, and since Parade is a bit thicker than most sock yarn, it is going pretty fast too.

The goofy gloves are finally done!

The gloves like the outdoors.

I finally finished one of my many works in progress. And boy are they ever goofy! I tried to get Fiona to model them for me, but they are too scary for the 2 year old--she ran away. They are very, very soft and I particularly like the extra long wavy wrist portion since I hate a cold draft floating up my sleeves.

I managed to finish them because, horror of horrors for a food addict like me, I have a stomach bug that has made me weak and wobbly today. It has granted me time to knit, but that is little comfort for the diet of tea, toast and ginger ale that I'm stuck with. Sorry to say, this is going to delay the posting of those vacation photos of nice food--just looking at them, much less describing them, right now would not be a good idea...

Pictures are back

and thus so is Brian! Very nice to have the hubby home, of course, but my camera withdrawal was getting pretty serious.

Here is our favorite street sign from Trier:

Yes, there is a place called "Meat Street"

and in France, dog love extends to public dog water bowls outside the bars.

It's nice to know that all the dog shit you step in while in France comes from well-hydrated dogs.

I do promise actual food photos of European food delights soon.

In the meantime, I'll update you on the beneficial effects of jet-lag. I keep getting up at 3:30 am (my body thinking that I've slept in 'till 9:30) and thus I've found more time than usual to read. I polished off Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot in two mornings. It was a speedy read and I enjoyed it, but not as much as The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I think it also would have been better in smaller doses rather than a marathon read. Bank is incredibly good at irony and dry wit, but I enjoyed the early set of stories (all about the same character at different points in her life) more than the later ones primarily because I had a little irony-overload by the end.

I do appreciate that she is able to tell a compelling story without relying on the horrors of modern life to move it along. There are no sudden acts of violence, incidents of incest or other crises of that magnitude. The conflict in the stories is the stuff that we all deal with everyday--what "success" mean both to ourselves and the world, how our self-image can be warped by the presence of other people, and the shock of being considered a "grown up" by the world when you still often feel like a kid.

I'm about half way through Sara Donati's third Wilderness book, Lake in the Clouds, and am alternating reading it with Fallen and the almost completed John Adams. And when I finish one of those puppies, I have Pope Joan to start.

I'm gonna miss this jet lag induced reading spree when my body eventually readjusts. The plus will be not becoming an incoherent mess at 7 pm each evening (that is to say, more incoherent and more messy than my usual state).