Links and lists

I'm too low-January-energy to write a proper blog post so a link-heavy, list-type post will have to do.

Books you should read:

• Best book I forgot to blog about last year: The Gone Away War by Nick Harkaway. This is one of those books that I feel inadequate to comment on because it is so brilliant (sort of like my author hero worship where I approach a much admired author and stutter like an idiot.)
  
• Most quirky-fun book of poetry I've read in a long while: Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler. The people around me had to put up with me reading this out loud to them.
  
• Amazing historical fiction I just finished: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It has been a long time since I read such a compelling and elegantly written piece of historical fiction.  (And it is particularly good if you are a late-medieval/early-Renaissance English history buff. This made me want to see the whole series of Shakespeare's war of the roses plays again.)
  

Food you should eat, especially if you are doing a healthier-food resolution:

• This cauliflower cous cous combo. I substituted shaved Parmesan for the manchego and topped it with a healthy squeeze of lemon juice (which I think it needs). Serve with a spinach salad.
• Fish in a packet--take a piece of tin foil, spread a little left-over brown rice on it, slap on a piece of tilapia. Salt and pepper it. Top with abundant quantity of: scallions, chopped dill, sliced red peppers, halved cherry tomatoes, spinach and feta. Drizzle with good olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Seal up packet and bake at 400 for 20 minutes. Slide onto plate.  Super fast and super good.
• My friend Emily's curried bean thread noodle bowl which I will post about soon since it deserves a recipe write up.

Dignity, always dignity*

 

The fish hat strikes again!

It serves its designated purpose--keeping me warm but not crushing the curls.  And I like to think it lends its wearer a certain elegant je ne sais quoi.

If you're feeling shy, it can help with that too.

* from Singing in the Rain, my favorite movie when I was 10.

My new love: Scrivener

Since the end of NaNoWriMo, I've been having a lot of problems with the organization of my novel-in-progress. Or I should say, the dis-organization. And the universe heard my frustration and answered with a tidy solution.

Here is the software solution to chronic disorganization:


Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. (I even like its icon--the yin yang and quotation marks--perfect!)


Its like I have my own personal team of software developers who heard about my (writing) problems and created this software just for me--that is how perfectly it solved my (writing) problems. I downloaded it a week ago and have been using it happily all week.

Actually, that is an understatement: I have been **spazy** and **thrilled** to get to my computer each day and to get my paws on my story. It's like my computer now has a magic organizing fairy inside!

Instead of wading in the mire of folders that I had in the word processing program that I usually use, trying to find what I know I wrote last week and want to now incorporate into my master document, and tearing my hair out because I can't remember whether it is in the file titled "Scrap" or the file titled "Fearless Risk Taking Writing" (which I named on a day that I needed a little pep talk) or in the file titled "Rewrite" or the file titled "Gaps to fill". Scrivener helps me actually find what I am looking for pretty quickly.

It has even transformed my non-creative days into productive days. I did not write much new prose today--my brain was foggy and groggy and really not sharp enough to spit out sparkly words that anyone would want to read. But with my buddy Scrivener I was able to solve some other important problems that didn't require a creative mind: things like in which POV a troublesome chapter should be written, how to integrate the antagonists story in the flow of the plot (rather than my previous method of having a separate file called: "Bad Guy Stuff" with little stars inserted into the main document where I thought parts might eventually be inserted). I was even able to come up with some chapter titles. This is all stuff that I would have struggled to do with my word processing version--it was just too big, too long and too much of a mess.

And even better, since I was a NaNo winner, I got 50% off the regular (reasonable) price of $40. I can't even quantify how much the $20 I spent on this software has increased my productivity.

Coincidentally, the same week that I discovered and started to use Scrivener, I read a terrific book, probably the best book with an unreliable narrator I've ever read, called Liar by Justine Larbalestier. I'm not going to blather on about the content of the book because it does have a nifty plot twist that I didn't see coming and I don't want to ruin it for anyone else. Let me just say, it's a really well written YA novel that I'd bet a lot of adult readers would enjoy. The Scrivener coincidence came up when I finished the book and was reading the author's acknowledgments (I like reading these--does anyone else? Though I confess it bugs the crap out of me when they are positioned before the book begins. I think you should thank people at the end of the book). In it she says that she used Scrivener to write the book and didn't think she could have managed the complexity of her plot without it.

I started reading this book the day after I downloaded Scrivener and now that I have played around with it for a week I can completely see how it would make her novel much more manageable. Another reason for me to feel grateful for Scrivener since it enabled me to read a really fun book!

Now I just need to see if the smart people who created Scrivener have another program that will solve the rest of my problems. Anyone know of software that can tackle the problem of every horizontal surface in my house being covered with paper? Earlier this week I waded through a mountain of bills, catalogs, the girl critter's many drawings of dragons, the boy critter's homework that I have no idea whether or not he was supposed to turn in last month, scraps of paper with phone numbers but no names, coupons that I'll probably never remember to use, printed out recipes, book reviews, torn off pages from the Cute Overload calendar, business cards, school phone directories, and so on. I thought I did a pretty good job of organizing and recycling, but now that it is the weekend, I look around the sty house and it has all reappeared.

If someone can write a program that solves this problem, I swear I will drop this novel writing nonsense and devote myself to pitching your product until you have made your first million.

cookie swap

Warning! After viewing the following photo, you may feel a surge in your blood sugar level:
That's right, this past Friday was the annual Michigan Lady Food Bloggers' cookie exchange!

I brought lavender lemon shortbread and molasses raspberry cookies (on the big white platter in the photo).

It'll be a little easier to name the cookies with the photo below, which contains the quantity I brought home, minus the cookies I ate while at Patti's, minus the cookies I ate in the car, minus the cookies Brian ate when I came through the door... (The cookies I brought aren't in this photo because I gave all of them away at the swap. I froze some extra dough so we can have some once we deplete this vast quantity of sugar and fat...maybe sometime in April...)

Starting with the top left corner and working vaguely clockwise we have: apricot and raspberry linzer cookies, white chocolate cookies, pecan snowballs, ginger snaps and molasses cookies, three different kinds of 'bastards': Oreo bastards (the white ones), lemon bastards (the yellow) and peanut butter bastards (the chocolate), raspberry rugulach, Hanukkah dreidels and stars, Spritz cookies, mini carrot cardamon muffins, date walnut spirals, anise cut outs, chocolate crinkles, and chocolate macarons.

I love this tradition--it is the best way to get variety in your cookie selection and I get to hang out with a bunch of cool women for an evening and I don't get guilt-tripped by my critters for ditching them for an evening. When they saw this platter of sugary bounty their eyes went all round and they started treating me like God.

New problem: hat head

Since I filled up a trash can at my hairdressers with the bulk of my hair recently (quick way to lose 5 lbs) I have felt the liberation of the short haired.

I'm loving the short hair but, with the newly nippy weather, have now encountered a new problem: hat head. It's not something you have to worry about with a ponytail, but with short curls that are kind of wiry in the texture department, putting on a hat is like sticking my head into a weird hair mould--pointy hat=pointy head, bowl hat=bowl head, etc.

So I've been on a quest for a knitting pattern for a loose warm hat that won't smash my curls or make me look like I have a muffin on my head.

I knit this one (pattern is available for free on Ravelry if you are a member):
It treats the curls well, but isn't very warm due to the loose knit and the shape (it only barely covers the tops of my ears.)
If I pull it down over my forehead, my head looks like a big moss covered boulder. Not really the look I'm going for. So this will do for a brisk fall day, but I hear that a blizzard is on the way and this hat does not have the chops to keep my noggin warm.

So I also cast on to make myself a fish hat like the girl critter's. I tried hers on and it is pretty loose but able to be pulled down low to cover most of my head. And I don't look like a muffin-head; I look like a fish is swallowing my head (but that's intentional, right?)
The colors are all wonky in the photo; I'm making it in the subdued tones of grass green, dusty blue and black. Because subdued is really the quality I'm going for with a fish on my head...(really I chose them because they were a) in the stash bin b) all wool so hopefully warm c) passed the squish-up-against-my-forehead-not-itchy test).

Does anyone have ideas for other patterns that might work for non-curl compression? Please send me any ideas because I have a feeling I'll be in some situations this winter where a fish might not be totally appropriate...

Beer-y pleasures

As I mentioned in my Montreal food post, we did some pleasant sampling of various beers while we were on our trip.

On our one evening in Toronto, we visited the Beer Bistro. It's a really lovely spot with a terrific range of beers on tap (click here to see a mostly-legible photo of the beer menu):

Papa beer and the three baby beers.

My samples were of three excellent Canadian beers: St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout, Durham Hop Addict and Ephemere Cassis. If we hadn't been going to a play afterward I would have followed these with a full size of the St. Ambroise. Brian's was a Leffe Brune.

They also make some terrific fries served with mayo and seriously addictive smokey ketchup.
I wasn't as impressed with the sandwich I ordered which was a shaved lamb and blue cheese panini--it was just kinda greasy.

Montreal has a number of good places to try local and non-local beers. I loved the bar decor at Le Cigare du Pharon where we had these lambic beers. It's a Belgian place and is covered in Tintin memorabilia. Brian and I had fun identifying different scenes and witnessing someone else's obsessive trinket-collecting habits. Unfortunately it was too dark to get photos of all the quirky stuff without bugging the crap out of the other patrons by using the flash, but here are the beers:
Brian's Mort Subite kriek (cherry) and my Floris fraise (strawberry). Mine had 25% strawberry juice and was less dry than I expected though it still managed a nice crisp finish.

Conveniently located right around the corner from our hotel was a branch of Les Trois Brasseurs. I tried their Brun and Amber and thought they were both pretty tasty, though not super memorable.
Brian is drinking the White in this picture which I did not care for--I thought it had way too much coriander in it so I couldn't taste anything else. But tear your eyes away from the beer and focus on what he is eating: a banana chocolate tarte flambee. We've had the classic tarte flambee when we were in Strasbourg: creme fraiche, onions, and bacon on a thin crust that is a cross between a pizza and a cracker. But I've never had a desert flam and this one was fantastic. I thought Brian was crazy when he ordered it, but I was won over with my first bite and am now a determined to make it at home. It seems pretty simple: crust, bananas, cinnamon, some sugar and a dark chocolate sauce drizzled on after it comes out of the oven. If I figure out a recipe, I'll be sure to post it here. And if I can locate the St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout around here, I'll serve it with this.

Sadly we did not get to sample the wares at Dieu du Ciel or Reservoir. We got to Dieu du Ciel an hour before they opened and were too tired to wait around. Ah well, next time. We loved Montreal so much that there definitely will be a next time.

Winner!

I did it! I added 53000 words to my novel this month.

Whew!

That said, my novel is more done than it was but still not a full draft. I'd say the last third is still pretty sketchy. The first third is now pretty darn good and the middle third is on its way.

But the best thing about NaNoWriMo is that I realized that it really wasn't that hard to crank out 2000 words a day. I really loved the little statistics page on the NaNo website where you saw your word count compared with your daily goal. I'm going to set up a spread sheet and log in my efforts on my own to keep this momentum and motivation going.

Today I am going to clean the house and make dinner and deal with a lot of the stuff that I let slide in the past month. I know that sounds like a sad way to celebrate but asserting some order on my real world (as opposed to my fictional world where all the organizing energy has been spent of late) will feel good. I'll blast loud music and make cookies, too.

And tomorrow morning, I'll be sitting down and cranking out another 2000 words.

Munch your way through Montreal

Let's start with a dramatic shot:
That's a huge pile of smoked meat, the Montreal version of Pastrami, at Schwartz's. All the guide books warned us that there would be lines down the block--they clearly weren't in Montreal in November! We waltzed right in and found a seat and moments later were looking at this spread:
Classic smoked meat sandwich on rye with mustard, half-sour pickle, coleslaw and diet coke (I know, it should have been a black cherry soda to be authentic, but I needed some caffeine.)

And then we dug in:

Thanks to Brian's photographic efforts, I have discovered that I often eat tasty things with my eye brows way the hell up:
Fairmount Bagels: I'm cuddling the other 11 which are still warm and are like carrying a bagful of kittens (except you can eat them!) Montreal bagels are boiled in a water and honey bath and the sweetness on the outer crust is very nice.

We indulged in a little French bistro food at L'Express:
The bass and green beans were delicious but that is probably because they were sauteed in about a pint of clarified butter and cardboard would taste good with that treatment. I had a glass of Pouilly Fumé and a tasty octopus and lentil vinaigrette appetizer but the photo didn't come out because for about 15 minutes the restaurant lost all power. They seemed to expect it (and we saw a big Hydro-Québec truck parked on the block) and had candles ready but it made for lousy picture taking.

There is a big Vietnamese population in Montreal which led us grab the occasional Bánh mì sandwich for a snack and to indulge in big bowls of Pho,
with copious quantities of basil and bean sprouts to stir in.

There is also a food phenomenon that I ardently wish we could persuade to come to Ann Arbor: Portuguese Chicken.
Here it is, with a couple of really delicious loin lamb chops. Doesn't look like much: grilled meat with fries, right? But oh, how wonderful the seasoning is. The mug in the background contains extra marinade so you can really douse your food in it--tangy, spicy, umami. Yummy. (The fries, which were super fresh and crisp and hot, responded particularly well to a dousing in the marinade followed by a little dip in mayonnaise. Mmmm: fat with salt and then a little more fat!) Oh, and it's pretty cheap too. There are a whole bunch of Portuguese chicken places in Montreal and, were we lucky enough to live in this city, I can imagine it being our take-out stand by for those crazy days when no one has time to cook.

The only food area that I wasn't thrilled with was the lack of patisserie on every corner. Actually, the lack of patisserie on any corner. There were a few bakeries that we saw, but they were really more bread oriented, not the individual elaborate pastries that are everywhere in France. So, other than a strange and delicious creation that I will cover in my next post about Montreal beer, we hardly had anything sweet.

Then again, with my salt tooth, I'd go for a smoked meat sandwich over a mille-feuilles any day.

Not a traditional Thanksgiving post

Many of you may know that Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday--I like the sentiment of focusing on the good since it is a nice antidote to my normal pessimism, but I'd rather do that over a plate of something more tasty than dessicated turkey and bloppy mashed potatoes.

This year Brian and I decided to feel really grateful--for each other! It was our 10 year anniversary in September and we knocked around a bunch of ideas for how to celebrate. We decided a trip somewhere together without the critters was the way to go and since we have two sets of local grandparents to abuse the generosity of, we picked Thanksgiving week to abandon our spawn.

We contemplated trips to Italy/Spain/Southern France but the budget (and the US Dollar) did not support such a plan.  Finally we decided to go somewhere that feels a bit like Europe but is easier and faster to get to, friendlier and a hell of a lot cheaper since it isn't exactly a major tourist destination in November: Montreal!

We took the train from Windsor, stopped for a night in Toronto and saw a really excellent experimental production of Hamlet and then spent four days in Montreal.

We probably got really lucky--the weather was beautiful, in the 50s, for most of our time there and we only had only one brief period of rain and even that fell on the evening that the Musee d'art Contemporain is open late (and free!)  I complained at one point when we were walking into the sun that it was too bright and Brian, that sainted man who has put up with my moody self for 10 years and deserves a big medal, resisted the urge to whack me upside the head for kvetching about too much light!

Hotel rooms are cheap cheap cheap in November. Even the schwoopy boutique Hotel Gault was less than $150 per night. We decided on the Auberge du Vieux Porte and it was way nicer than we could have afforded at a different time of year. There was a terrific breakfast included in our pretty room with a view of the port and every afternoon at 5 pm they poured big, free glasses of a decent shiraz and laid out a plate of tasty cheese and grapes and baguette for the guests to consume before heading out for the evening.

The food in Montreal is lovely and the people even lovelier (and that is saying something since the food is really damn good).  I think it may be my favorite North American city, definitely one that I would happily move to if life made such demands on me (not likely, but a girl can dream.)

We returned home at 1 am on Friday morning and that evening we consumed the dessicated turkey and bland side dishes with the slightly frazzled grandparents and felt very, very thankful for our good life together.

Stay tuned for some photos/highlights of our Montreal interlude.

Progress!

I just passed the 25,000 word mark for NaNoWriMo--that's the half-way point and supposed to be today's goal. Because Brian and the critters are up north enjoying the beauty of Michigan in Autumn (and possibly freezing their asses off, but the weather has been kinder than in past years) and it is not yet noon, I suspect I will be able to add significantly to that word total in the second half of the day.

One thing that has really kept me going during NaNoWriMo has been new music. In the past I've written mostly to classical music--some traditional (the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony and Bach cello concertos in heavy rotation) and some less so (Steve Reich and Philip Glass minimalism which can get me into a writing trance and make me forget how long I have been sitting in front of the computer).

But this time I'm writing to songs with words. I used to find the words in songs terribly distracting to my own attempts at prose generation. But this time I'm not distracted or annoyed but feel it pushing me gently to keep going. I'm using Pandora Radio to keep a stream of good stuff coming out of the speakers. So far my best writing has come from a station* composed of Great Lakes Swimmers, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Iron & Wine (who I just discovered will be at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival on January 29th). Men's voices, particularly kinda soft ones, seem be doing the trick which is strange because this isn't music I've written to or even listened to that much in the past. I've tried making stations based on some of my favorite women singer's voices but they haven't kept the words flowing like the boys. So thanks boys!

Do you have any particular artists/genres that get you writing? What is on your writing playlist?
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* I'm not sure if that link will take you to the station or not...I can e-mail individuals with a link that should work if you ask (nicely!)