Recipe Reduction 97-96

Thai Red Curry Noodles With Vegetables
by Melissa Clark

Before I relate how I totally failed to make this dish correctly, can I just talk to the recipe author for a minute?  Here's what you said in the head note:
Once you have all the ingredients at the ready, the dish comes together quickly. And you’ll have enough leftover curry paste to make this again, even faster the next time.
What if I didn't like it? What if I didn't want to save half of the doctored up curry paste for a second, even faster time?  Furthermore, what was the point of taking two tablespoons of pre-made curry paste and adding into it all the of ingredients that made up the curry paste in the first place?

It's not the first time I've seen a recipe take a manufactured product and add into to it the same ingredients that were already there. I've even seen cooks take enchilada sauce and add cumin, garlic, chili and tomatillo. But for me, this is the end: never again will I make curry paste and add curry paste to it.

It came out very good despite my many accidental substitutions.  It's basically the same recipe I should be able to make with my eyes closed by now: fry some onion, garlic and hot pepper; add the curry paste and a little extra spice; add coconut milk and vegetables; simmer until smelly. Apologize for the odor in the kitchen to a husband who doesn't care for Indian food.

The one unusual touch was the shitake mushrooms. I adore the little morels, but I don't recall ever seeing them in Thai cooking before. Probably my stupid.

Strawberry Avocado Spinach Salad with Poppyseed Dressing
from Gimme Some Oven

Finding this sort of recipe in the backlog is really teaching me a lesson. Here's the breakdown of what it requested vs. what I used:

   fresh baby spinach - okay, got that; but I'm going to use some lettuce too
   strawberries - couldn't get at the farmer's market so I'll just skip them
   1 avocado, diced - I'll just throw in a slice when I'm ready to eat it
   gorgonzola or blue cheese - not for me
   sliced almonds, toasted - too much work; skipped them
   red onion - didn't have; used a couple scallions instead
    1 batch poppyseed dressing (recipe below) - made a half batch and threw half of it away.

The poppyseed dressing was okay, but only because I have really good olive oil from the Texas Olive Ranch near Carrizo Springs. The oil tastes great but the dressing just tastes like oil.  I don't get the point of poppy seeds. Vered Guttman at The Washington Post says,
    Poppy seeds taste nutty, or, when ground to the consistency of moist soil, they offer a pleasant fruitiness I find irresistible.

He finds irresistible; I find tasteless. Should I have ground them up?

A Young Lady's Experience of War

Not So Quiet
by Helen Zenna Smith

I am told, by a possibly unreliable source, that the author set out to write a parody of All's Quiet on the Western Front but instead wrote a serious work based on the war diaries of a female ambulance driver. I could believe that if a writer were confronted with source material like that that portrayed here, he would feel compelled to tell the story--straight up.  This is some grueling (and gruesome) stuff.

I don't doubt it's 99% true, simply because I don't think anyone could make this up. I'd forgotten the cruelty of this first big war--poison gas, bombs, tanks and trench warfare. She describes dropping off stretchers of men with the most inoperable of injuries, and thankfully, doesn't have the knowledge of just how badly they would end up being treated at the makeshift hospitals of her time.  But I do--or at least can imagine it.

Every time you hear a person attempt to glorify war, you should slap them across the face with this book. Or if it's a politician, with a tire iron.

it's over and I'm heartbroken

Heartless
by Marissa Meyer

I do so truly love Marissa Meyer.  But be warned: don't pick this up if you're not prepared to let her steal your heart and--and---and-----

Did you hear me slapping my hand across my mouth right then?

I can't say another word.  Except that she's a comic genius at fracturing folklore, twisting tales, pulverizing poetry, and meddling about morals. She's the nemesis of nursery rhymes. This time she started with Through the Looking Glass and went absolutely mad with it--mad as a hatter.

I live in fear and trembling she might take up The Hobbit as her inspiration some day.

Good adventure but missing a sense of place

A Long Way From Nowhere

A Couple's Journey on the Continental Divide Trail

by Julie Urbanski,Matt Urbanski

I gobbled this up and enjoyed it no end, but I'll only recommend it to people who love traveling and hiking but are stuck in one place for a while.  I enjoyed the people--the man and woman alternating chapters along the way. But I didn't feel like I was really there--I was a spectator watching them be there, but I was somewhere else and that place was far, far away.  It was like the difference between watching a narrated slideshow versus watching a big-screen movie with surround sound.  I wanted the full deal; I got the slideshow.

They're really cool people and had some wonderful times, and I appreciate the chance to read about their journey. I'd gladly read a second volume--how's that for a recommendation?

Gardening In My Roots, apology edition

Gardening is kind of sucking right now. Yes, I'm getting a great crop of purple hull peas which I didn't expect, since I only planted them for the nitrogen they fix. The yellow cherry tomatoes are doing well but some of the plants are starting to die.  The cucumbers are NOT setting fruit (all the wrong gender flowers???) and neither are the lima beans. In fact, the lima beans aren't even flowering.




But my one dear sweet eggplant I bought at Lowes is trying so very hard!













Since I can't show you vegetables in abundance, here's a different sort of gardening.

Recipe Reduction 99-98 (Under 100!!!)

Pumpkin Pie Oats
from The Crunchy Radish

When I measured out the spices, it seemed like a lot: 1/2 teaspoon ginger, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, a whole teaspoon cinnamon, for just two servings of oatmeal. That's as much spice as you'd put in a entire pumpkin pie!  And sure enough, although it smelled good and tasted okay, there was a distinctly bitter aftertaste.

I was also disappointed at the (lack of) quantity of pumpkin. Pumpkin is a lovely thing and I want to get more of it in my body, but this only called for a half cup. So in a serving of about 1-1/4c cooked oats, there is only 1/4 cup pumpkin.

I'll have to put this one in the category "to find a better recipe for."

Vegetable Pita Pockets


One of those no-brainer recipes I can't believe I took the trouble to save. But since I did, I'm glad--it served as a reminder that some of the best lunches can be the easiest.

Recipe: get some pita breads, split into halves and open them up to make pockets. Sometimes they tear and become unusable, but I'll give you this secret hint: it tastes exactly the same if you tear them into pieces and eat with a fork.

Fill the pocket with chopped raw vegetables and dress with something fatty--avocado, salad dressing, hummus.

That's it!  And no cooking required. I may take these on my next airplane trip.

aka "How to pawn your junk off on other people"

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

It's really mean of me to say this, but this book makes me wonder if the author didn't read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and think, "Wait a minute! We've got a tradition in Sweden called dostadning or Death Cleaning. I need to write a book about this so people don't think the Japanese have a copyright on cleaning."

Tacky of me, right? But really, that's how it felt at first. It turned out to be a sweet little book, part memoir and part advice column; it really made me want to get the job done and not leave it to my loved ones.  But it didn't have the eye-opening whack-on-the-head effect I anticipated after having to wait so long for a copy at the library.

Most of her advice is sensible, but this bit could be cruel if carried too far--

Tell your loved ones and friends what you are up to. They might want to help you and even take things you don't need...
Perhaps a grandchild or someone else you know is about to move into their first apartment. Invite them over ...[and] have some bags and boxes at had that you can fill while you are chatting, so they an take stuff with them right away.

I apologize if I distorted her meaning, but I wish she'd included a strict warning against coercive tactics! Imagine visiting your beloved grandmother and going home with a box of china knicknacks that you're going to have to display, store, and move for your next five years of apartment living. You only took them to make her happy and they're going to make you miserable until you finally get old enough to start your own death cleaning.

She's very sensible with her advice about discards, such as this note:

...sometimes you must just give cherished things away with the wish that they end up with someone who will create new memories of their own.

That wish seems like pure self deception. Why not just say goodbye and send them to the landfill? They've lived a good life and made you happy, just let them go. Of course, she's talking furniture or vintage clothing--that sort of stuff may very will end up with someone to cherish them. My cherished things--acorns, children's "art", tattered paperback books--wouldn't be so lucky.

Recipe Reduction #100 at last

Kale, Tomato and Lemon Magic Spaghetti
From A Modern Way To Cook
 
Time she said it would take: 15 minutes
Time it actually took: 22 minutes and I only made a half recipe

Before I say all the bad stuff about this recipe, I want to say just this:
       It tasted good!

Here's an outline of the technique:
Put the spaghetti in a pan with olive oil, halved cherry tomatoes, and the zest of a lemon. Pour a little boiling water over it, slap on a lid, bring to a boil, remove the lid and boil for about ten minutes.
You have to "turn" the spaghetti every 30 seconds to a minute so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Meanwhile you strip the leaves off a bunch a kale, tear them into bite-sized pieces, and add them to the pan.
When most of the water has evaporated, it's done. That took just a little longer than ten minutes.

The only change I made to her ingredients were to reduce the oil--she called for 7 !!! tablespoons of olive oil--almost a half cup!!! It might have tasted good if you're on a high-fat diet, but just the idea grossed me out. I used less than two.

On the other hand, all that oil might have kept the pasta from sticking to the pan. I did a lot of pan scraping in my ten minutes.

I did have one other deviation from her stated recipe--it called for the zest of two lemons, but then told you to "grate in the zest of both lemons". So was the zesting time included in the total time, or not?  I included it, and discovered that it takes me about two minutes to zest a lemon. If I'd done a full recipe instead of a half, that would have added another two minutes to my total time. (A minor detail.)

The only other reason I can imagine my time was so off is that she appears to have a kettle of water boiling in her kitchen at all times. Or maybe one of those electric instant boilers. I started my timer at the point when I put the pot of water on to boil. While it heated I prepared the rest of the ingredients, but still had to wait a minute.

One final note: unless your kale is really tender, put it in at the beginning of the cook time, not the end. I put mine in about halfway through and it was still very challenging. Not the recipe's fault, though.

All bad-mouthing aside, it's a surprisingly great recipe! I'll be repeating this one. With mushrooms!

(And if you haven't heard enough on the subject...) there's a certain online chef (okay, it's Marc at https://norecipes.com) who has the best recipes ever. I've not had a single one go wrong and they've all been delicious. But even he says lies like this: mince garlic, peel and mince ginger, finely dice onion, peel and cube 4-5 Japanese eggplants, chop a tomato, seed and dice a green pepper. 
          Prep time: 5 minutes. 
 
I can close my eyes and imagine an experienced chef doing all that in five minutes. Maybe. So maybe the lesson I'm finally going to learn is simple: count the number of ingredients needing preparation and multiply by 3. Then allow twice that time and hope for the best.

On survival against some pretty grim odds in the foster care system

Crocodile Mothers Eat Their Young
by Avi Morris

Becoming a parent is a huge responsibility--an frightening commitment to eighteen some odd years of protecting a screaming little bundle of insanity. Protecting it from itself, from the world, and from your own tendency to lose your temper sometimes. It's a lot of work but most people manage to do it fairly well.

And then there's this woman. Failed on all counts and truly made  your skin creep. Luckily the book wasn't about her--it was the hopeful story of the rescue of one of her children. Or--more realistically--how the two older girls managed to rescue themselves and the foster Mom and Dad who helped them.

Parts of the book were told from the Dad's point of view and the parts that he didn't personally witness are just relayed flatly, as a newspaper narrative. Which is only fair--anything more would have felt "made up", or sensational. But I would have enjoyed reading the Mom's story. She's the one who instigated it all--he was just dragged in against his will. In fact, she seems the true hero of the story.

Walking, eating and dogs--a trifecta for me

Walking With Peety
The Dog Who Saved My Life

Eric O'Grey with Mark Dagostino

Even better than I expected!  The blurbs on the back cover say more than I could hope to repeat, so I'll just tell why it hit me in the soft spot.

1. He starts at the beginning, and ends just a little past the end.  (I get tired of books that start with a teaser from a quarter way through the story.)
2. He adopts an older dog--good boy!
3. He gives a day-by-day, then week-by-week, diary of his changing diet and exercise. It's funny and gives the bad right along with the good.  For example, when he came home with his doctor's recipe for rice and beans, along with the ingredients he'd purchased to make it--

...One of the cans of beans I picked up was labeled "baked beans." I hadn't really considered what that meant in the store, but I was glad now. I figured those must have some flavor to them. I read the ingredients and sure enough, they had plenty of 'seasonings' and 'natural flavors.' They also had something I didn't expect: pork.

...That struck me as strange. Why would they sell non-vegetable vegetables?

He then proceeded to cook rice, setting off the smoke detector and ending up with a chunky pile of mush surrounded by a burned crust.

But that was only his first vegetarian meal--he learned quickly. With amusing mistakes.

His dog ownership fared better, after he found out that "Raider" had never jumped into a car in his life and never seen an elevator before. Although, now that I think of it, my dogs have never seen an elevator either.

My only desire is that it could have had a little more dog and a little less Eric, but that's trivial. It's great--read it.

Recipe Reduction 104-101

Green Beans With Almond Pesto


from Smitten Kitchen

What happens if you pick fresh green beans from your garden and leave them in the refrigerator in an open bag way too long, then steam them and top with a ground up mix of toasted almonds, garlic, Parmesan cheese, fresh thyme and olive oil? For me, it was sheer embarrassment--I found myself sucking the pesto off the beans and tossing them in the garbage.

Embarrassment aside, I think she's onto something with this. I tried the same pesto on some cooked cabbage and broccoli but it didn't play as well, so this is clearly a green bean thing. I just wish I'd made it before I killed the beans.
Great, fattening pesto:



 




Pasta with Ruby Chard and Cranberries
adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Cooking For Health

This recipe gets a B+ for effort but I get an F for execution. I left out the cranberries and walnuts. Truthfully, I don't think it would have made a big difference--instead of being a dish of bland pasta and greens it would have been a chewy-crunchy dish of bland pasta and greens. Not a keeper.


Whole Wheat Blackberry Ricotta Scones
adapted from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman

The instructions needed a generous sprinkling of adverbs:
quickly,
speedily,
working fast, and
with great haste.
Because if you dawdle the whole mixture is going to spring up under your fingers into a puffy, unworkable mess. Between the cutting into six wedges and the fetching of the baking sheet, the dough rejoined itself along the cutting line. I ended up throwing it in whole, like a big, puffy cookie.

If I ever attempt anything this foolish again I'm going to set my home thermostat on 65 degrees and chill all my mixing tools in the freezer.  Or move to Alaska.

It didn't taste bad at all once I'd smothered it in powdered sugar.


Ginger Berry Chia Pudding
From Crunchy Radish

The recipe called for 2 tablespoons of chia seeds to one cup of liquid, but either my chia seeds were defective or that was not enough. My "pudding" is as thin as water.
This other blog https://www.eatingbirdfood.com/basic-chia-seed-pudding/
calls for 3 tablespoons of seeds and gives this advice:

In terms of timing, the chia seeds start to absorb the liquid pretty quickly, but you do need to give the pudding a bit of time to build the gel-like consistency. I usually add the liquid, give it a good stir, let it sit for 5-10 minutes, give it another stir to make sure the chia seeds aren’t clumping and then let it sit in the fridge for an hour or two, but if you’re in a rush you can eat it within 20 minutes or so, it just might be a little liquidy. Another great option is to make it the night before you want to eat it and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

I think I'll follow this advice in future.

Culture Clash 19th century style

A Woman of the People
by Benjamin Capps

A story of a girl whose family was massacred by the Comanche in Texas; she and her little sister were taken as slaves and ended up living as Comanches for the rest of their lives. For most of the book the girl's thoughts are consumed with plans for escape--she works hard to be trusted, learns to live from the land, practices running fast the better to run away...but the People treat her as one of her own, until at the end, maybe she is.

This is a work of fiction and while it seems to parallel the sad story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the author deliberately did not read a history of her capture until after he wrote this. He did his research and he clearly knows the lands and the times--he's known as "one of our country's most respected writers of Western Americana"--and in this tale he attempts to put himself in the mind of a 10-year-old girl growing into a woman.

He got it. It's an awesome story. The writing is flat, unemotional as newspaper prose, and sometimes it's easy to put down--until he does this:

The sounds of locusts in the late sumemr nights were a thing one did not hear without listening for them. They were there for a lonely person: high and keen, low and buzzy, many of them. Some of them came in broken chirps, even and patient and never-ending. Others were a constant, steady background from all directions. Behind the clear sounds were others, more distant. Behind those, still others so far away and faint that they seemed not so much insect sounds as a sigh of the living earth itself. Sounding of locusts was like standing of grass, or spreading of sunlight, or moving of leaves, or blowing of wind, a thing that went everywhere far out across the boundless land and lay ready before the People for them to feel wherever they went; or before such a one who was lonely, for her to feel whenever a quiet time came. It was a help, a familiar thing, a source of wonder. For her thoughts could not follow them to their end; they spread on forever, to strange people, as far as the endless earth herself.

The ending, when Tehanita and Burning Hand have a long talk about white people and their mysterious ways, is shocking. Just a snippet,

Listen, a long time ago the Indian saw the white man coming with wagons, and he said there's a fool, because a wagon is too wide to follow a buffalo trail. But what does the white man do? He makes the trail wider and smooths the rough places; then he carries as much with six horses as we carry with thirty.

Will we ever learn to live in harmony with the land? Is it even possible?

Recipe Reduction 106-105

Early Summer Green Goddess Salad
from A Modern Way To Cook

The estimated time for this was 20 minutes and I can't argue with it because I failed to time it. (I goofed.) It could easily have been done in 15 minutes, provided your vegetables were already washed and trimmed and all of the ingredients were pre-measured. Which is never the case in a home kitchen. But okay.

As a salad goes, it's nothing remarkable--asparagus, snap peas, and edamame lightly cooked and mixed with spinach and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. All great stuff, of course. But the dressing was a pleasant surprise and even fairly low in fat--avocado, coconut milk, honey, a chile pepper, basil, cilantro, soy sauce and rice vinegar. I'm keeping the recipe, although I may rename it as Spicy Avocado Salad Dressing and add the salad ingredients as serving suggestions.


Oven-Fried Green Tomatoes
from Fat-Free Vegan

I've used ground flaxseed with water as an egg substitute before and it worked fine, so I don't know why it didn't work this time. Possibly because I just mixed them up before and didn't destroy their consistency in a blender?


In any event, the mixture failed to thicken--I could have just dipped the tomato slices in water and got the same results. When I dipped them in the cornmeal-flour mixture, they didn't pick up much coating. And when I baked them half of it fell off.

None of that really mattered because the tomatoes were too acrid to eat. Maybe some varieties of tomatoes are okay green but mine aren't.  I even tried a little extra salt, thinking it would be like eating a lemon. Yuck.

Flipped but not read

Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
by Fuchsia Dunlop


I read a lot of this, but not enough to call it "read". But this is interesting--

The chili itself, now at the heart of Hunanese cooking, only reached China from the Americas in the late Ming, although the Hunanese were among the first in China to adopt it, in the late seventeenth century.

It turns out it was Portuguese traders who spread the chili pepper. Columbus and the early English traders were looking for black pepper (genus Piper, family Piperaceae). Chili peppers are classified in the genus Capsicum in the Nightshade (Solanaceae family).  They were adopted so quickly into Indian and Chinese cooking that early botanists assumed the plants originated in the east, and they're not alone. As she says,
Many Chinese find it hard to believe that chili peppers are not indigenous to China.

Recipe Reduction 110-107

Stir-Fried Garlic Lettuce
from The Breath of a Wok

The recipe said to use hearts of Romaine, but I think that's unnecessary--any lettuce would do, especially the excess I got from the CSA when I already had plenty of lettuce in my own garden. But don't make the mistake I did, of trying to use lettuce that has gone to bolting--it's better that wasting my good garden lettuce, but bitter is still badder.

Grilled Fish Tacos with Chipotle-Lime Dressing
by mabcat
The sauce was way too hot and extremely limey. The fish was boring and acrid with lime.  But I used less than half of the lime juice they said!  What would have happened if I'd used it all? 

Just possibly if I'd grilled the fish instead of baking it--although the recipe said baking was a perfectly viable alternative--it would have been prettier. Not edible, but prettier.

Sometimes, with a recipe like this, I wish I could watch the author make it, and then sample his results. Because mine stunk.  Would his (or hers)?

Shrimp and Avocado Tostadas

author unknown

I love this treatment for shrimp. Just salt, chili powder, cumin and oregano; cooked quickly on the stove in a little oil. The tostada shells--from the grocery--were good too. The only corrections I would make are:

1. Large shrimp were awfully large, considering the size of the shells (about 4"). Medium would have been better.
2. Too much citrus, as always. For two avocados he wanted 2 teaspoons of lime juice. Maybe his were California avocados, but for my Haas avocados about 1/2 teaspoon was plenty.
3. After the shrimp were done, he wanted you to add 2 more teaspoons of lime juice to the pan and stir it around.  So apparently he didn't want his shrimp to taste like shrimp, but like limes.

I'll definitely do this again--with my adjustments.


Quick Pickled Red Onions

Good, but don't save the leftovers with the chunks of garlic for a week and then pull it out of the fridge and try to eat it. The garlic turns evil!

Nature write at its absolute best

The Living Dock at Panacea
by Jack Rudloe

Sad as any tale of Florida offshore life, but strangely optimistic at the end--whatever man can create, hurricane can obliterate.

It's a gorgeous voyage of a book, ranging in distance from as close as a walk down to the floating dock to ten miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, but ranging in depth from millimeters to miles. I'll let him tell the story of his living dock himself, shortly (although there's much more to say):

When the bay was swollen during a spring tide or a storm, they stood floating like battleships high up on the waves, and I could step from the stationary dock onto the floating Styrofoam dock with no trouble at all. But when the moon was full and all the waters were sucked out of the bay, or the powerful north wind pushed the waters out, exposing the mud flats, the floating dock sank far below the oyster and barnacle zones on the pilings. In fact, there were times when the winter wind shoved all the water out of the bay except for a narrow channel, and the floating dock sat squarely on the bottom like some sort of stranded sea monster bearded with huge amounts of tufted oysters, barnacles, and other fouling growths.

After the introduction to his dock, the book goes on and into the depths and shallows of the bay, and the results are delightful.

...you never know what you're going to find in a mud-flat pool left by low tides. Often there are long waving clusters of filamentous algae that are strangely beautiful and look like a woman's hair. And sometimes there are oyster shells overgrown with red and yellow sponges that stand out starkly from the dark brownish black bottom. The real surprises come when you find five or six frilled sea hares, grayish green little blobs of life spewing out long strings of eggs. Sometimes a flounder is stranded in the pools, or a sea robin, and once I found a blazing red and brown scorpion fish with bristling spines.

It's not all peaceful meditation and beauty. It's an ocean, after all. There's death and life and high drama at sea--

"Will you get the hell off the air!" I hurriedly interjected. "We're caught out here in a storm. Emergency!"

"Well...I never..." came back the voice. "some people are just plain rude."

Deep, shallow, thoughtful, frivolous...I'm running out of adjectives. Just read it; you'll understand.

Gardening in my Roots, Hot and Dry

Lettuce season is over--I spent part of my weeding time yesterday pulling up bolted lettuce stalks for composting. I like this year's strategy of planting three different varieties rather than a mix. Remember next year: the Romaine is not as tasty as the others, but it's slower to bolt.

I've had a major hatching of these odd, creepy bugs on the tomato plants. I suspect they're not a good thing but it's not like I can hand-pick them. And I'm certainly not going to use a pesticide.




A trip to a Shades of Green Nursery gave me a possible solution to my squash vine borer debacle. A very knowledgeable gardener--heck, hey may have been the store owner--knew the problem very well.  He quickly repeated everything I'd already learned, then said that if the eggs are in the soil, a good dusting of diatomaceous earth would cut the caterpillars to shreds as they tried to crawl to the stem.

So I've dusted and will see the results. I'm not sure if it works when the eggs are laid on the plant. Seems like in that case, they'd just crawl down the plant.



The sungold tomatoes are being kind to me.

And the sage--isn't this an odd color for sage flowers?  I thought they were purple!

Suffered by comparison. My loss.

The Night Circus
by Erin Morgerstern

I'm finding it impossible to review this book impartially because it suffered so poorly in comparison with its neighbors. Let me explain.

I started listening to the audiobook awhile back, while I was finishing up One Was a Soldier. (Not on purpose, but because I was having trouble with my book player.) Then I read Ghost, resumed with Circus while Patina was being shipped to my nearby library,listened to Patina, then resumed with Circus but also started reading Will's Red Coat. I try not to do stuff like this, but it just happened.

The Night Circus is beautiful, mysterious, fantastical, magical. Everything, everything is unreal. The characters--with the possible exception of Bailey--are fascinating but unconvincing--actors on a stage or zoo creatures in cages, pacing to and fro but not living a life in a real world.

Contrast that with Army veterans fighting flashbacks and nightmares. With a boy learning to face up to life's challenges, including the biggest challenge of all--controlling his temper. With a girl who loses her father and mother and pressures herself to replace them both. With a man opening up his house and his heart to give an aging dog a safe and happy place to die.

I don't want to admit I've lost my capacity to wonder. Some--nearly all--of the images in The Night Circus will live with me forever. It would make a superb animated movie. All it lacks, to prevent it being a masterpiece, is the human connection.

Recipe Reduction 112-111

Corn Chowder With Maple Toasted Coconut
From A Modern Way To Cook

This was supposed to require 25-30 minutes. Yeah.

I didn't have a 'griddle pan' to grill the corn on, so I stuck it in the oven. Thus I did not count the time to cook the corn--I just stuck it in the oven for an hour. Probably a half-hour would have been sufficient but no matter, I didn't count it.

What I DID count was the time to shuck and clean the corn, chop the onions, peel and chop the sweet potato, and cook it and the cauliflower until soft.  I even stopped the clock when I had to substitute a butternut squash for the sweet potato and I realized it was going to take longer to peel.  I also stopped the clock for enough time to cool the soup down so it wouldn't melt my immersion blender attachment.

And the total was: 44 minutes.  I believe you'd call that a margin of error of 50%. Plus it didn't taste all that great.

Braised Fennel With Saffron And Tomato
from Vegetable Literacy

Okay, I didn't add the butter. Would that had made a difference?

So you take fennel bulbs and cook them with fennel seeds, fennel stock and fennel greens. Then  you attempt to enhance its peculiar wang with saffron, thyme, garlic, onions and tomato paste; add a tablespoon of butter and a grate of Parmesan cheese. And guess what?  It still tastes like fennel!

If you like fennel, you'll love this. Me, I'm not feeling the love. I'll keep eating it until it's gone and maybe that will change.

And excuse me if I harsh on the writer a bit: if you call for Fennel Stock in the recipe, shouldn't you include the recipe for making it? What help is it if you tell me to trim the fennel and put the tough bits away for stock, and then call for stock in the recipe? If you'd made a note of that up front, I'd have made the stock the day before.

Note to myself: for lunch today I had the Spinach Maangchi, the Corn Chowder, the Braised Fennel, and some dried blackeye peas that I simmered in water. And the best recipe award goes to,

Mom's Blackeye Peas
Ingredients
  Dried blackeye peas from the grocery
  Water
  Salt
Method
Rinse the peas in cold water. Put in a pot and cover with cold water by about 1". Bring to a boil and boil one minute.
Turn off heat; cover; let sit for an hour.
Bring back to a boil, lower heat to a very slow simmer. Simmer for about 45 minutes, adding water if the pan gets dry.
When they're tender, stir in 3/4 tsp salt for each 1 cup dried peas.
Serve hot, warm, cold, wrapped in tortillas or frozen into a popsicle. Delicious.

Following Atticus was just a warm-up exercise

Will's Red Coat
by Tom Ryan

A story I'll read again, whenever I need to cry and smile and remember this:

To the right, a tiny red coat with a thick white collar dangles from a hook. It looks a lot like Christmas and is just about the right size for an elf. There is a bit of magic in it. Of this I have no doubt. For that little coat gets me to stop many times each day to consider what matters in life and what it means to be human.

One of the best written first chapters I've ever read is followed by a short and thoughtful story of Tom Ryan taking in an old dog for hospice--to give him a gentle home to die in. All true--but so much more.

And if the fabric of the natural world could inspire humans, we who have often let the comfort of what we've built rob us of what connects us to nature, I imagined Will would find it invigorating.

He did hike indeed

I Hike
by Lawton Grinter

A collection of stories and a joy forever. Mr. Grinter pulled stories out of the memories of his many trails--Pacific Crest, Appalachian, Continental Divide, John Muir and others, and put them together in themed chapters. Who could resist chapter names like Ice Cream Headache, The Bears of Yosemite, Death by Bloodletting, Zee Vater? Reading them was almost as good as being there, and in the case of the mosquito episode, better.

It's not an instruction manual, but you do learn a bit--the difficulties of hiking in National Parks, some good remedies for chafing, what time of day to ford icy streams (morning). And you learn a lot about the wonders of trail magic, hot showers, and instant friendships.  And you learn that it's best to ignore food challenges--

I had just paid someone five dollars for an ungodly amount of ice cream that I was going to try and devour in less than one hour. If I was able to accomplish this feat without soiling my pants, I would be presented with a tiny wooden spoon for my efforts and become part of an obscure club that no one outside of Pine Grove Furnace State Park or the thru-hiking community would have ever heard of or care about. Sounds brilliant.

In case you're wondering, he drank the coolaid--I mean, ate the ice cream. He wasn't even deterred by the sight of a fellow hiker running from the table to the bathroom, returning after 15 minutes, then flopping on the cement floor and groaning while clutching his mid-section.

I'll leave it to you to find out if he finished the carton. Read the book if you need to know all the gory details; otherwise, just use your imagination.

He also describes trail angels and trail magic, like coolers of free beer, soda and candy bars left at crossings--although there was one sad episode where a bear got to the cooler first. His bears are never a wondrous wild animal to admire; they're pretty much always a pain in the butt.  I'm not criticizing him for that. If I'd been woken up four times in one night by people yelling and clanging pots to drive the bears out of the campground, I'd feel the same way.

The only thing that came off strange was that he almost never described the terrain through which he hiked. There were no Mountain Majesties, just uphills followed by downhills followed by uphills. There was no noisy birdsong at dawn, no awesome fields of flowers, no chipmunks--how can there not be chipmunks? Maybe he thought these things weren't worthy of inclusion or maybe he just didn't feel up to the writing of them? I know they had to be there--so where were they?

Recipe Reduction 114-113

Savory Swiss Chard Pie
by Susan Voisin

It was a valiant attempt to make a shepherd's pie without potatoes, but it didn't succeed. The topping was made from tofu, nutritional yeast and potato starch, with raw cashews thrown in for their rich creaminess. Sounded interesting...but it came out with the texture of wet cornbread and almost no flavor at all. If it hadn't been for the bitterness of my nutritional yeast, which is apparently old and needs to be thrown away, it would have had absolutely no flavor at all.


I don't know what the onion powder was supposed to add, nor the pinch of nutmeg. Whatever it was, it didn't. Sorry. You can blame my technique or my yeast or even me, but I am not looking forward to finishing this.
 


Sigeumchi-namul
 by Maangchi


Simple and quick; should have been the perfect side dish. But I'm thinking my proportion of spinach to seasoning was off--too little spinach, too much seasoning.  It called for eight ounces spinach to 1-1/2 tsp soy sauce, sesame oil, and 2 tablespoons sesame seeds. Most likely my bag of spinach was closer to four ounces.

Try again but adjust accordingly.

Whole family adventure--great!

 

A Life Without Borders: 

By Sailboat, Planes, Train, and RV, a Funny and Inspiring Tale of a Family's Quest to Escape the Boundaries of Their Ordinary Life

 by Carla Gray Bedell

I enjoyed this so much that as soon as it ended, I wanted to turn back and start over. A family--husband, wife, young son and younger daughter--jump out of the rat race to spend a few years on a 38-foot catamaran called Allegria. The transition wasn't easy, at first. In the rush of packing and preparing, her daughter brought home an invitation to a cookout, and the mother says no, they can't go.  Too much to do--

I angrily said to her the words that will stay with me forever, "Who said this was supposed to be fun?"
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how crazy they sounded. Who said this was supposed to be fun? Really? I just said that? If it wasn't fun, then why were we doing it? I let out a deep sigh, relaxed, and gave thanks for being blessed with such an insightful daughter. Giving Tessa a hug, I said, "You're right. This is supposed to be fun. We're going to a party!"

There was still plenty of hard work, storms at sea, scares of pirates, entry permits and customs declarations. But there was plenty of fun, too. And snorkeling. And beaches. And seafood so fresh it jumps off the plate.

I wanna go too.

Great promise, great tedium

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Copyright 1898 and supposedly very popular and frequently reprinted in the early 20th century. It aged well, especially the gardening parts. I enjoyed the occasional mention of "the babies" (her three children) and the Man Of Wrath (her husband, a mild-tempered sort who indulges her little hobbies graciously.) But halfway through she writes.

    I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to provoke such an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate decreed otherwise. Quite regularly, if I look forward to anything, Fate steps in and decrees otherwise; I don't know why it should, but it does. I had not even invited these good ladies -- like greatness on the modest, they were thrust upon me.

And so on. If you love her writing style, you may enjoy the second half, but I found it tedious. She entertains her unwelcome guests kindly and becomes pretty fond of one of them, but one hundred pages of petty jealousies, behind-the-back snips and weary criticism became...well, wearisome. I kept hoping she'd get back to gardening, but no.

It's funny contrasting the gardening efforts of a turn of the century gentlewoman with mine. She supervises her gardener and laments when he plants the rockets in rows rather than masses of color--

...no future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite so reckless a fashion.

I supervise myself and lament when I find my own Man of Wrath has planted daffodils directly adjacent to a walkway or 5-foot tall flowers in front of a 3-foot tall bird bath. I can guess when the birds are bathing--but only because I see splashes in the air over the tops of the flowers. Sadly, when I discover that such a disaster has occurred, it's up to me to put it to rights. I don't get to delegate to the gardener. Shovel, trowel, wheelbarrow and my own dirty fingernails get the job done--or it doesn't get done.

My advice: if you love gardening, read the first half. If you love her writing, carry on with the second. But don't expect rockets.

Gardening In My Roots, hot weather edition

First 100+ degree day and I've lost another squash plant. Damn borers!

On a positive note, I harvested some more carrots. It's way too late for them--they're decidedly tough, but still tasty. I should cook them...if they survive the cat attack.

The tomatoes look sad--too few leaves to cover the still green fruit. But the cucumbers are leafing up awesomely!









And the winter squash are trying to choke out my pepper plants. I'm rerouting them, whenever I catch them. I hope they don't mind the temporary indignity of being disentangled from their support and flopped over on their backs.  Winter squash are lovely to have, but peppers are indispensable!

Awesome little YA book--with running!

Patina (Track #2)
by Jason Reynolds

What I like about Jason Reynolds is his ability to take kids who have been through bad situations and show what it's like in their normal lives--normal, that is, for kids with a secret history they don't like to talk about. I bet kids can really relate to these books. They'll see themselves--maybe they don't have a daddy in prison because he chased his wife and son throught the streets with a gun, maybe they don't have a mother with both legs amputated on account of the sugar--she don't like to say diabetes because it has "die" in it. Can you blame her?

There's a lot of street dialect in here, but I have no trouble understanding it. Maybe that's the difference between a person writing the way people actually  talk instead of writing in a made-up, try-to-be-clever home-boy speak, like certain other authors I've tried to read recently.

The only bad thing about listening books with well-done dialect is that I start speaking like them. Remember my experiences with Brit-speak? Now I'm going to start saying things like, "he just trash-talking" or "getting up at the butt-crack of dawn."

Recipe Reduction 113

Carrot and Beet Soba With With Chard
from A Modern Way to Cook

Next on the list of timed recipes -- 20-25 minutes is the author's estimate and it took me...
20 minutes 54 seconds!  Yoo hoo!

With one quibble--the recipe called for 3-1/2 ounces kale or chard. I used beet greens but what the heck, it's the same thing. The instructions said, only: "shred the greens." So I didn't start with a bunch of greens lying on the counter--I started with greens that had already been washed in three changes of water and stripped from the stem. Unless she buys her greens pre-washed in plastic bags, she left out ten minutes of the preparation time right there.

A similar ingredient was "leaves from a small bunch of cilantro". Why wasn't the five or so minutes it takes to pull the leaves off the small bunch of cilantro included? I'll guarantee you can't buy de-leaved cilantro in plastic bags.

It tasted pretty good but I don't expect to make it again. I'll decide after eating it for a lunch a times or two. I'm especially worried that the "thumb sized piece of ginger" that I was supposed to "coarsely chop" is going to bite me. I love ginger but don't like chomping down on a big hunk of it.



The final verdict: I love soba noodles, but the carrots and beets did nothing for them. Except stain them purple and make them hard to eat while you're wearing a white shirt.

Great YA audiobook and it has sequels!

Ghost
by Jason Reynolds

I'm very glad I waited on the audiobook! The library had two copies and they were checked out for months. But worth it--the narrator rocks!

Yes, he sounded like an educated man in his twenties playacting the voice of his early teenage self, but he sounded so right. Especially when the author went off on totally idiotic asides--you can hear the joke in his voice: describing a man as a white James Brown; laughing at the word fartlek; perfecting his method of consuming sunflower seeds....

It's funny, really. Not out loud funny, but smiling one minute and heartbreaking the next, funny. I can't think of any episodes to tell about that wouldn't be giving away the story, but imagine what would happen if you'd just spent an hour running away from a bad situation only to arrive at track practice to find out the workout for the day was long distance running?  With the coach trailing behind in The Motivator Machine?