Bread, Wine, Salt

Is there a word for the sadness you feel when you realize you are almost at the end of a book that you love and you will never be able to read it again for the first time? I asked that on facebook, and my friends answered "No, but there should be, because that's definitely a thing and you should tell us what you just read because we want to feel it, too." Normally I am a glutton of all kinds. I eat too much. I drink too fast (water, I mean. Also beer and wine and whatnot, but I limit myself strictly on those so I don't end up doing something stupid.) I binge watch TV shows. And I swallow books whole. I read the first three Harry Potter books in a single weekend, and the rest in one or two marathon sessions each. I'm also a re-reader. Books that I raced through the first time often get a slower, reread. I dip in and out of them when I have a bit of time. I know how they end, so I'm not in any particular rush to get there and I can better enjoy the ride, w...

I haven't written anything worth sharing recently, or cooked anything worth writing about. It's been full speed treading water for a while here. I have a novel I'm supposed to be writing, a writing class I'm not keeping up with, and a letter I should have written months ago that I haven't started.  It's an important letter, and I hope it will be a good and helpful letter, but it will also be a hard letter to write, and a sad one, so I keep putting it off because I am a much better person in theory than I am in practice. But as long as I haven't written that letter I don't feel that I can sit down and write anything else. And so here I am, with something someone else wrote, because maybe you want to read something wonderful. I've read Charlotte's Web to my boys several times now. E.B. White's prose is magical. I could put almost any of his descriptive passages here to show you what I mean, but the rope swing is my favorite. His phrases s...

I have a problem, which is that I have a fear of talking about my book because people might think it's incredibly lame that I have written a book.  So for the last couple of days when I've seen people in real life and they ask me what's been going on I'm all, "Oh, you know, the usual . . . " and then we nod at each other like "Yep, the usual, yep."  I don't say "Hey, I wrote a book, and I'm going to get serious about publishing it soon and I'm very excited and nervous and some other things, too." But it's true. I did get serious. I had it professionally edited and then professionally formatted so that it would look nice in people's e-readers and I swallowed hard and I sent it out into the world. And then I told Facebook about it and not one of my friends said "It's incredibly lame that you have written a book." At least none of them said it out loud, to me. What they said to me was that they thought it wa...

In October of 1997 I was on a ferry from Calais, France to Dover, England.  From Dover my friend and I had a long train ride to the North of Scotland.  After a month of hostels and backpacks and European men with questionable intentions, my friend and I were still friends, but we did not have eight hours of conversation left in us. I needed a book. I picked two books from the duty-free gift shop on the Ferry, and read them both on the train. One was The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian, number 18 in a popular series featuring the brave, dashing sailor Jack Aubrey and his friend the naturalist and intelligence agent, Stephen Maturin. The eighteenth book is not the best place to jump into a story, but O'Brian and his publisher knew that, and the new reader is helped along with crucial bits of backstory, so I didn't have trouble following it. I've forgotten the other book I bought that day, but in the nearly 16 years since I first read The Yellow Admiral I've be...

If you were to invite me over to your house and then leave me alone, to chase after some child who is raiding some other child's couch full of animals , for example, then I will eventually end up digging through your cookbook collection. You're welcome to come over and dig through mine as well. They're in the cabinets above the stove. I borrowed Maud's copy of Avoca Cafe Cookbook (more correctly the Irish version thereof, a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted their baked lamb with cumin, cardamom and coconut milk recipe, thinking it might be similar to a dish I ate in an Indian restaurant years ago. I cannot resist an interesting bread recipe, so when I saw the lovely picture of round loaves of seeded bread on page labeled “Multiseed brown bread with fruit” I knew I had to try it. Now, as it turns out the picture had nothing to do with the recipe, but I liked the ingredients in the recipe too, so I decided to give it a shot. The first four ingredients...

Sometimes the births I attend as a doula are intense, and there is no talking beyond simple phrases (come here, drink this, press here, turn that off) sometimes there are long stretches where my role is to keep people's minds off of their worries. I never discuss politics or religion with a client unless they specifically ask me a question, and then I answer as briefly as possible.  I will discuss food, but not the politics of my food. The other day I sat with a client and waited, and waited, and waited for a planned cesarean to happen.  There was a lot of time to talk and eventually we had each other's who histories including my undergraduate degree in animal science.  The father asked me if I was a vegetarian, so I explained about free-range, humanely raised meats.  He wanted to know what that cost, so I told him.  And he made a face, which is fair, because it's a lot of money.  I explained that we compensated by eating less meat (which is easie...

The men of the household are at the barber shop getting haircuts.  I am home making menu plans.  (No, come back.  I swear I am still a feminist.  I have righteous indignation and everything, just not about menu planning.  My husband does the grocery shopping!) Here is the plan for this week: click to embiggen The page numbers with no initials are from Supermarket Vegan . Menu planning is not commandment carving and sometimes things from last week get shifted to this week.  The pages marked "sne" are recipes from  Super Natural Every Day by Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks .  Heidi is the cook I want to be when I grow up, and I love her cookbook.  I just haven't done much with it yet, so it made sense to pull it off the shelf this morning.  There are so many wonderful pictures, it's hard to pick.  I know this is a book I'll be going back to as the seasons change. You'll notice that I don't plan a lot of breakfasts an...

I have two methods of menu planning. The first is to sit down with my husband and decide which of our regular meals should be in rotation in a given week, and then make sure that our shopping list reflects the plan. It's easy, but it's a tiny bit boring. The second method is to pick up one of my many cookbooks and flip through it looking for recipes I want to try. A book which has been sitting on my shelf for a while, sadly neglected, is Supermarket Vegan . I picked it off the shelf last week and made a menu plan. I love this book. I am not a vegan, not even a vegetarian, but when I do eat meat it is grass-fed, free-range, humanely-raised meat, because I believe it is better for me, better for the animals and better for the planet. “But” say my friends, “that kind of meat is so expensive.” And they're right; it is. No one knows that better than the person who bought the rib-eye roast for the Beef Wellington at Christmas dinner. (Me!) Since we don't have a v...

You may be aware than I am a big fan of homemade birthday cakes. But my husband doesn't want cake, he wants a cheese custard with a crust. Sure, we call it cheesecake, but it's not cake. I feel like I'm cheating somehow, serving up custard pie when I should be making layers and frosting them, and maybe even trying out some of the tricks I learned at the cupcake workshop I attended a while back. But no, he wants cheesecake and it's hard to argue that the layer cake means I love him more than the cheese pie he really wants. So it must be the best cheesecake possible. Naturally I turn to someone known for being meticulous about recipes, Jack Bishop of America's Test Kitchen. The cheesecake is fabulous. It is creamy with just enough sweetness. The crust holds together but doesn't require you to hack at it with the knife. We will ignore the fact that this recipe comes from gimmick cookbook Cooking with Friends where the Friends in question live...

All in Just One Cookie by Susan Goodman and Timothy Bush If there is a small person in your life who loves cookies this book is a great way to introduce the idea that ingredients all come from somewhere other than the grocery store. Grandma gets a call that guests are coming over so she starts whipping up a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Her cat and dog do research online and in real books, to find out where the flour, butter and the rest of the ingredients come from. There's a simple narrative and a lot of sidebar type sections, so you can read as a bedtime story or take the time to dig in deeper. My then three-year-old loved it, and I think it would be quite popular with kids who are independent readers as well. The illustrations are charming, and the full recipe is given at the end of the book so you can try it out, too. (This is an unsolicited review. No goods or services have been received in exchange for this review. I am not affiliated with the auth...