Reading that inspires research

[Author's note: This partially written blog post has been sitting in the Drafts folder of my e-mail program for ages.  I am hoping that sending it out into the world as an unprotected draft will be more encouragement to finish it.  So, as usual, my readers, you are in on the ground floor of an experiment.  Take careful notes.]

The Swan Thieves sent me in search of my copies of The Story of Art and The Impressionists: A Survey so that I could read about Impresionism, but my recently recovered mythology books are coming in handy as well as because there is a reference to Leda, mother of Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra.   For some reason it comes as a surprise to me that Helen is immortal.

I also came across the reference to Eris which my brain has been trying to unearth since I heard the name.  Eris is the goddess of discord.  Not sure if that is the reference intended by the Google Olympians (Googlenauts?) at HTC -- manufacturers of my beloved Droid Eris, Saraswati -- or not.  They do like to be upstarts, after all.

References and research aside, The Swan Thieves is an absorbing story of art, unconventional love, and the madness which so often shadows them both.

Perhaps it is simply that in all of my reading of science fiction and fantasy and food memoirs, I haven't read a "real" novel in quite some time, but Elizabeth Kostova's use of language is enchanting.  So much so that I finally understand the hype which surrounded her first novel The Historian.  Well, I potentially understand it since I only have a copy which I have not yet read, but if the style and the language are similar, I expect equal absorption and enchantment.

Coffee, cheese and the dangers of grocery shopping without a list

About a week ago, I received a small cash bonus at work.  Not enough to radically change my life, send me on vacation or buy a new car, but enough to make me want to do something specific with it rather than simply tossing it into the bank account with the rest.  I debated responsible versus frivolous and consumable versus collectible.

In the end, it came down to a wish to experiment with coffee and ended up with breaking the rules of pragmatic grocery shopping and a rather expensive piece of cheese.

First the coffee.

I have never been much of a coffee drinker.  My caffeine fix has always come from Coca Cola (affectionately known as the Red Can of Death in my world).  Somewhat amazingly, I gave it up about three weeks ago.  It might even be three weeks ago today now that I think about it.

I have known for quite a while that this particular bad habit had to go, especially since I now sit for a living and three hundred or so extra empty calories just can't be good for a person, no matter how good they taste or what sort of energy boost they offer.  Even though I strongly suspected that I was at least as addicted to the sugar as the caffeine, if not more so, I have read enough about the horrible things that caffeine can do to a person's bones to realize that it had to go as well.

The key was always going to be finding a reasonable alternative, and no, caffeine free diet Coke is not a reasonable alternative.  It's just trading one set of bad chemicals for another, and I can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners.  Plain water was also not a reasonable alternative.  It might be good for me, but it's just not satisfying.

When someone introduced me to sparkling water with fruit essence, I was suspicious at first, but it has turned out to be a fairly convincing decoy.  Water, CO2 and fruit essence.  No calories and no artificial sweeteners.  When chilled, it almost tastes like soda, and if it goes flat, it's just slightly flavored water, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Other caffeinated and sugar-laden vices lurk in the shadows, however.  The grande mocha frappuccino with whipped cream is a not uncommon indulgence, and I have developed something of a taste for hazelnut coffee with a dash of Jameson's and a swirl of whipped cream.  Between those two items and driving past what looks to be a lovely new little coffee house in town yesterday morning I got to thinking about the possibilities of decaffeinated coffee.  After doing some research into taste and method, I decided that part of my small financial windfall would fund an experiment in decaffeinated hazelnut coffee (giving me the opportunity to use the long neglected French press coffee pot in my possession).

Off I went to the grocery store with thoughts of coming home with coffee and a gallon of milk (and possibly a dvd or two from the rental shop next to the grocery store).

At this point, the trouble started.  I was hungry, and I had no shopping list to stick to.  I definitely came home with coffee (three different kinds even though only two were decaffeinated) and a gallon of milk, but it seemed that everywhere I looked, there were tempting things which made my stomach grumble, so I soon had a shopping basket laden with two everything bagels, crusty Italian bread, a medley of olives (why just Kalamata, I thought, when I could try all of these others), a few mozzarella balls, a bag of Sun chips, raw almonds, frozen chicken strips and crinkly fries, toasted ravioli (which turned out to be quite tasty despite coming from the freezer section, a small jar of black olive tapenade (which I have wanted to try but never got around to), and a rather expensive wedge of cheese.

This wedge of cheese can be blamed for the purchase of the olive medley and the tapenade because the sign claimed that the cheese flavor would be complemented with olives.  (The sign turned out to be quite right.  A bit of cheese on a dab of tapenade on a hunk of crusty Italian bread is a grand and glorious thing indeed.)

I'm usually a mild or medium cheddar sort of a girl, with mozzarella (especially if fresh), occasionally Swiss, muenster, Havarti and Brie, and a nice blend of the harder cheeses like Parmesan, Asiago and Romano thrown in for good measure.  (Please excuse the seemingly random capitalization if it is incorrect.  I decided to trust this program's spell checker.)  Lately, however, what with the more cooking and reading about food -- especially food in France where they make all sorts of wonderful cheese and even have shops devoted entirely to the sale of cheese, which I imagine to be expanded versions of the cheese counter at the small Italian I remember frequently as a child with my mother -- I have felt the inclination to broaden my horizons, and decided that this was the opportunity to do so.  As a result, I decided to try Manchego, a Spanish cheese which is somewhat crumbly and has a tang similar to Asiago, though perhaps a bit sharper.  Delicious!

Meanwhile, I am so taken with the black olive tapenade that I am inclined to try to make my own.  But not today.  Today I am making creamy leek potato soup with crispy leek rings to ward off the spring chill.

As a somewhat related aside, while I do love to cook, one distinct challenge I have found is dealing with the cravings.  I don't just get hungry; I crave.  Sometimes it is a particular taste -- salty, sweet, chocolatey -- and sometimes it is a particular food or dish -- lasagna, hummus, potato chips, fried rice, potato leek soup.  When a craving for ravioli kicks in, I certainly could make them myself, but it is so tantalizingly easy to just pick up a package at the grocery store which is two minutes away from the house, especially now that more gourmet fresh varieties are as easy to come by as frozen standards and taste so much better.

Since I know that what I make usually tastes better than what I buy in the store (and I am a lot more aware of what is in it), the trick becomes finding those extra hours in the day for cooking and sensible grocery shopping.

Wendy Werris' Alphabetical Life

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books by Wendy Werris was interesting enough to hold my attention because it is fun to read about the book business -- and a part of the book business beyond the retail world with which I am familiar -- but more than once, the author's style was off putting enough to make me want to put the book down and not pick it up again.  She is a bit of a drama queen and comes across as rather self absorbed and narcissistic even for a memoir, which is by nature pretty much I, I, I from beginning to end.

Once I reached chapter five in which the author chronicles the heartbreaking story of her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure, however, I felt better about devoting time to reading this woman's story.

Chapter five is brilliant, but until that point the rest read like a gossipy, name dropping, guilty confession in which the author doesn't get around to confessing her most egregious sins, even though she is clearly dying to talk about them -- most notably her substance abuse, which gets mentioned and referred to but not detailed because -- as her editor or agent probably told her, or as she told herself, this is a memoir about the book business rather than dependence on one or more psychotropic substances.

There are moments when she sounds like an egomaniacal loon (to the point that it makes me wonder if she might have been high or stoned while she was writing the book).

She makes all sorts of references which I don't understand, so I am not sure if they are literary or cultural or both.  Some of them don't even register as references until I am well into the next paragraph, or at all.  Is it just another form of name dropping or trying to prove her depth of knowledge of ... I'm not sure what since I don't understand the references in the first place and don't don't find them intriguing enough to research.  It's tempting to have somone else or even several someone elses read the book for me and tell me what I am missing and whether or not it adds anything to the story she is telling or the picture she is trying to paint.

Perhaps because of these references, I found myself wishing for clearer cultural, social and historical context, but instead she assumes that her readers were there too and have a lot of the same shared context that she does.  The problem with that situation is that if I lived her life in her time, I might not have any interest in reading her story.

She mentions smoking pot several times, and maybe I am naive in letting myself think that meant that the smoking was also occasional, rather than an ingrained and regular habit -- like the smoking of tobacco cigaretts as everyone in the book seems to do.  When she finds the Book of Mormon in the drawer of her night stand in search of a place to stash her pot, I found the drug reference almost superfluous, as if she felt the need to work it in somewhere, when I didn't think that she needed to mention it at all in the midst of her discussion of religious ambivalence in a Salt Lake City hotel.

Her mention of a "fondness" for cocaine was surprising, almost startling, but again it's at most a passing reference used to explain why she was able to bond with a co-worker who had participated in an addiction recovery program.  She doens't go anywhere with it or do anything with it.  It doesn't provide context or add to the story.  She just brings up this major issue in her life and then drops it.  She would have been better off to say something along the lines of "We bonded over mutual addiction recovery stories."

She has a reverence for books -- don't use dust jackets as book marks, don't put the book face down -- and a flagrant disregard for the treatment of her own body.

All that is missing is for her to tell me what books she read and what literary luminaries she met at Betty Ford or whatever rehab center or program she chose.

By contrast, the story about her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure didn't have any more to do with her career or the book business, but it was treated in depth and added to the overall story.  She's brilliant when she isn't talking about herself.

She doesn't seem interested in telling a whole lot of success stories about herself.  The embarrassments and humiliations and self doubts, meanwhile, are chronicled in excruciating detail.  She barely gives herself any credit for being a success in a male dominated industry when they were all male dominated.

"I didn't see the sense in hating men and never would. ... I could deal with the 'chauvinism' of those early days in my career, perhaps because I had the good fortune to not take it personally. ...  So I acquiesced to all of these gender-specific regulations, be they innuendos or direct instructions, and rarely felt that by doing so I was chipping away at my own soul.  It was fairly easy for me to distinguish between what was business and what wasn't."  (Page 99)

On the one hand, I love her self assurance, but on the other, I wanted her to recognize more clearly that she was helping shatter glass ceilings in her own way.

She has so many potentially fascinating things to say and stories to tell, and she keeps talking about drugs and alcohol (and cigarettes).  I know.  First I complained that she didn't talk about the drugs and alcohol enough, and now I am saying that it is too much.  That's my point -- all or nothing.  Pick what you really want to talk about, what story you really want to tell, and write it.  Don't keep jumping around and telling parts and pieces of different stories.

The book lacks a central theme or cohesive timeline.  If it had one or the other, I could forgive or understand the otherwise fractured nature of the memoir.  Realizing that it is a story built on memory, however, I wonder how realistic an expectation is cohesion.  Life, after all, tends to not happen in an orderly fashion, no matter how organized the participants, and recalling events from memory only encourages the chaos.

If the book becomes a bit less coherent towards the end as far as choice of material, it becomes better as far as the quality of writing and story telling.  She writes about her parents, her move toward representing (I can't bring myself to take seriously a word like "repping" which she insists on using as her job description.) university presses rather than more mainstream publishing houses.  Her story about the publication and promotion of The World According to Garp makes me want to read it.  Her profiles of the booksellers she worked with and got to know personally over the years make me want to meet these people.

"We never know what may happen when we pick up a book to read.  The turning of a page might actually change the course of our existence.  There is something miraculous about this.  Truth strikes at the very heart of books and the readers who turn themselves over with great trust to finding the essence of themselves." (Page 237-238)

Amen, sister.

Schizophrenic Knitting

My knitting is in danger of becoming as schizophrenic as my reading.

Although I have tried to become a bit more disciplined in recent years, I have a tendency to start reading a book only to be distracted by the possibilities offered by another book, and I simply can't wait to finish one before starting another.  I might repeat the process several times before settling down and making it all the way through a book.  I also have a tendency to decide that I need something new to read long before I have finished reading the titles on my To Read and my To Read Soon lists and shelves.

Unless I am doing research on a specific subject, my reading is far more emotionally and circumstantially motivated than methodical and organized.

So it seems to be with my knitting projects these days.

Several months ago, I fell in love with the fabulous sweater coat on the cover of the fall issue of Interweave Knits.  Purchasing the fabulous yarn practically put me in the poor house, but I was so excited about the project that I didn't care.  After I worked on it for a while, I decided that I needed a smaller project for those times when I didn't want to knit lengthy rows of stitches.

I became obsessed with lace patterns for scarves for a while, but none of them really took, so for a while the only project I had on needles was the sweater.  I have knitted some simple scarves with funky yarn, but those are done and were given away as Christmas gifts.

Projects get started and the yarn doesn't behave the way I expected, or I don't have enough, or I have too much, or the needles aren't the right size, and I end up ripping it out and rolling the yarn back up and putting it away.

The other day I decided that legwarmers were just the thing to make, so I found a free pattern that I liked online, and on my way home from work, I stopped at a local yarn shop and selected yarn and needles.  Given that the project calls for fine gauge yarn and is knitted on fairly small needles, getting the project started was a bit frustrating.  My hope that a small project wouldn't require quite so much concentration as the larger project dissipated quickly.  It's also slightly discouraging because one of the reasons I wanted to learn to knit in the first place was so that I could make my own socks, and the process is similar to that of making leg warmers.

It is quite possible that all I really need is practice to get the hang of working with fine yarn on small needles, but in the meantime, I am in danger of being distracted by the Jellyfish Bag.  Doesn't that look like fun?

I know.  I know.  I need to stick with the legwarmers.  And I will.  Perhaps the bag project can be my reward for completing the snuggly legwarmers.  That sounds like a reasonable plan, don't you think?

*****

Author's Note: In case there is anyone out there reading who might take issue with my capricious use of "schizophrenic," while it may be unfortunate for you, these scribblings are my own which you may choose to read or not in an equally capricious manner as you see fit.  The workings of my mind are certainly not for everyone.

Everyday writing

In trying to put together or maybe even throw together a blog post or two about the last couple of books I have read, I remembered why it is important to write every day -- practice.

I do a lot of personal writing and stream of consciousness writing.  I take lots of notes as I read books, scribbling thoughts, ideas and observations down as they pop into my head.

While these activities are reasonably good writing practice because they keeps the words flowing, I don't have to worry about pesky things like coherence and sentence structure, or even proper punctuation and spelling.

I occasionally forget that in order to turn the personal writing and the notes into something more fit for public consumption, actual, serious revision needs to be involved.  Now, revision is much more of a welcome companion than it used to be, but that doesn't necessarily make it any less challenging or time consuming.

So, in the face of this reminder, posts about An Alphabetical Live and The Swan Thieves will have to wait a bit longer before they see the light of day on the blog.

Just so you know

Because my tiny little world should know, and because he would never admit to it, I just have to say that I know the COOLEST geek on the PLANET!!

So there.

And, no, he will not help you with your geek-related quandries.

Sorry, but you're on your own.

A few notes on cooking and the joy of leftovers

Cooking is such a rewarding activity, which is a grand and glorious thing because I keep hoping that it is rewarding enough to get me away from eating a lot of processed and junk food, although I am sure that I will retain a few vices, such as potato chips and Coca Cola, no matter what tasty creations I manage to come up with in the kitchen.

Yes, I understand that cooking can be time consuming, and it's hard to fit in around a busy schedule of jobs and lives and kids and kids' lives.  Yes, I know that it can be difficult to find the energy after a long day at work to prepare a meal when it's so much easier to toss a frozen pizza in the oven, microwave a frozen dinner of some sort or order take out.  I won't even suggest turning off the television, walking away from the computer and making the kids put down the video game controllers and cell phones to help you.

I get it.  There are all sorts of reasons not to invest the time and effort in cooking, even if you do worry about what sort of additives and preservatives you might be putting into your body and the bodies of your family members.  But if you can only cook every now and then, at least think about the possibility of making enough at once -- either many portions of a single meal or even multiple meals -- to have enough left over to, well, have leftovers, a surprisingly rewarding by product of cooking.

Some people love leftovers.  Some people can't stand them but begrudgingly eat them rather than letting the food to to waste (or because their parents make them eat them).  Some people refuse to eat them under any circumstances.

Me?  I have learned to cook with the intent of leftovers.  Of course, that achievement is really not too difficult because I am generally cooking to feed one or two people, and most recipes claim to result in four or six or eight servings.  I suppose that I could do crazy things like halve the recipes, but for some reason I like to start with the proportions in the recipe.  Well, sort of.  Sometimes I actually end up with more because I don't have alternate plans for leftover ingredients, so it just makes more sense to throw them in, rather than risk letting them go to waste.

I make big pots of soup and freeze most of it so that I don't eat potato chips and Little Debbie snack cakes for lunch, or so that I don't go out for lunch and either spend money I don't really have or end up eating inexpensive but deadly fast food.

I love soups and stews because the portions are easy to freeze, as opposed to, say, steak and potatoes and green beans, and because the have a whole bunch of yummy ingredients cooked right in -- zucchini and potatoes and onions and beans and possibly some sort of meat -- and all of the ingredients happily melded together mean that very little seasoning, especially salt, is required.

Leftovers also offer proof that it wasn't my imagination that a recipe turned out well, and a little positive reinforcement never hurts.

Today, for example, I had another helping of the winter minestrone for lunch, sprinkled a bit of magic cheese (my term for a blend of parmesan, romano, asiago and I think one other cheese -- I buy giant containers of the stuff at a wholesale club, freeze smaller portions in ziplock bags, and put it in just about everything) over the top, and once again, yum!

Another sign that this cooking real food deal is becoming more of a regular, normal, natural part of my life is that I am getting better at keeping staples in the house, even if I did discover a lack of parsley while I was making the minestrones.

Someone brought us over a couple of nice steaks the other day.  One has already been grilled and consumed, but I decided that the other one needed some sort of wine sauce with mushrooms, so over to the cookbook shelves I went and found a lovely recipe for flank steak with red wine sauce.  (Yes, I know that the link takes you to a recipe for flat iron steak rather than flank steak, but I haven't a clue what the difference might be, and the sauce part of the recipe looks the same as the one I am going to use out of the book Giada's Family Dinners.)  No mushrooms in this particular recipe (although I found a recipe for a roast with porcini mushrooms which I would like to try the next time I feel the inclination to cook a large piece of beef), and I have not yet decided if I might add some anyway, but the really nifty part is that I have all of the ingredients, including a can of tomato paste.

My next challenge is to find a way to either use up an entire can of tomato paste or to store it in some useful way so that I don't end up with open, molding cans of tomato paste in my refrigerator.  Why is it that recipes call for so much less tomato paste than is in the can?  And it's not as if tomato paste comes in giant cans.  Well, maybe it does, but I only ever buy the little six ounce cans, and still most of it goes to waste.  Gotta work on that.

I still need to start a compost heap somehow, but for the moment I am opting for the delusion that biodegradable matter in landfills somehow helps aid the process of breaking down those things which really aren't biodegradable at all.

Ingredients only and minimal waste.  Those are the goals.

Edit to add: Maybe I was too enthusiastic.  Maybe I was on too much of a roll.  Maybe it's the stress of having to return to work tomorrow.  Maybe it is simply that preparing steak is not my thing.

The zucchini was nicely steamed, but the mashed potatoes were too salty, the steak was overdone in some spots and underdone in others and tough all the way around.  I forgot that preparing a steak in a pan requires WAY less oil than the recipe ever calls for.

The sauce that was supposed to go on top of the meat just tasted like red wine.  I had a lot of trouble getting it to reduce for some reason.  It ended up going down the drain.

Eventually I seemed to find a way to make the meal edible, but I was quite glad that I was only cooking for me.

I hope that the chicken in the crock pot turns out better.

Maybe another reason to enjoy making soup is that there is so much time to take corrective action as needed.

Whip It, good -- The Ugly Truth, not worth hearing

In addition to going to the theatre to see Edge of Darkness, I rented two movies: Whip It, which was good fun, if a bit predictable, and The Ugly Truth, the stars of which are far too pretty for it to be ugly.

Whip It is a coming of age story in the context of southern beauty pageants and roller derby -- what's not to like?

Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavendar with the same open honesty that she played Juno, except that this time she (or the character) is not quite so self assured.

Her mother, played by the marvelous Marcia Gay Harden, is convinced that the only way out of the tiny Texas town of Bodeen is through beauty pageants.  Not surprisingly, Bliss is less convinced, but she is looking for a way out, for a life different than that of her parents.  

On a shopping trip to Austin to purchase unladylike combat boots -- an endeavor her mother actually endorses until she realizes that they are in a head shop -- Bliss is completely captivated by some roller derby girls who roll into the shop to drop off some flyers and then roll out.

Thus a secretive teenage rebellion is born.

There is the usual angst and conflict, but everyone ends up on the same page in the end.  What makes Whip It different than so many other similar stories is that Bliss actually has friends to tell her that her rebellion is selfish and that she really should think about the consequences of hurting her parents by trampling their good intentions.  So often the parents, especially the mothers, are cast as repressive ogres when really they mean well and are just trying to make up for mistakes made and chances not taken in their own lives.

In the opposite corner, what's not to like is The Ugly Truth, starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler.

Now, I have been a fan of Gerard Butler since Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, and Katherine Heigl is funny and charming as the neurotic Izzy in Grey's Anatomy and on the big screen in 27 Dresses.

Admittedly, I stopped watching after the first forty-five minutes, so maybe I didn't give the film enough of a chance, but I'm not going back.

The problem was not that I had a hard time accepting the "truth" (because I agreed with quite a bit of it, especially the point Butler's character, Mike Chadway, makes about a woman needing to be both the librarian and the stripper) but rather because I couldn't believe the lovely, professionally successful, chicly dressed Abby as someone in need of a makeover.  There was not a chipped nail in sight, a hair out of place, or an article of clothing askew.  She was not a shrinking violet with a confidence problem.  She has her own house -- not an apartment or a room in her parents' house.  She does treat her love/social life like another job, which can be intimidating, but her only real issue is an insistence on believing in an imaginary man (which isn't much of an issue in my world as long as you recognize that he is, in fact, imaginary, and the reality will never completely match the fantasy, especially if it is an enduring one).

Heigl's character takes a lot of the same approach as I do -- "What's wrong with comfort and efficiency?" she asks when Butler's character complains about her wardrobe -- but I had trouble being sympathetic to the slim, leggy blonde whose definition of comfort and efficiency is still far more fashionable and feminine than mine.

I'm not trying to imply that gorgeous people have it made when it comes to love just by virtue of their georgeousness, but they are a few steps ahead of the rest of us when it comes to making that all important first impression on those extremely visual male creatures.  As Chadway, points out, "He doesn't fall in love with your personality at first sight."

I don't know how it turns out -- if she ends up with the orthopedic surgeon from next door who appears to be everything Abby has ever wanted or the crass loudmouth whose advice she is only taking to get him to quit ruining the morning news show she produces -- but there wasn't enough potential for transformation or growth by any of the characters to make me care enough about their "problems" to find out.

Feel free to watch the entire film on your own and let me know how wrong I am.

The Swan Thieves

I am in love with this book.   If The Historian is written in the same captivating, lyrical style, why have I waited so long to read it?  Hype, most likely.  Too much hype, and I either lose interest or have to wait until the furor has died down.  That is what happened with the Harry Potter books, and that is what I am waiting for with the Twilight series.

Fifteen chapters and ninety-two pages into Kostova's second book, and I am having trouble deciding how much later I can stay up reading or if it is time to take a shower and turn in for the night.

So far, it is riveting and brilliant and all of those other superlatives that you are always afraid to believe when you read them in reviews.

I love the characters and the story and the hints at a related, possibly parallel, story from the past.

Rave, rave, rave.

I'm not quite brave enough to find out if all of the artists and paintings mentioned in the book are real, but I am going to try to dig out my art books tomorrow to read up a little bit on the artists and periods I do recognize.  You know, for context.  Because I am that kind of nerd.

From books and movies to food

In the last few days I have written about movies and books (one of my goals for the year being to write about each book I read and film I watch), so I think that it is time for a food post.

Several days ago, when there wasn't much in the way of dinner suitable food in the house, I made a late night pilgrimage to the grocery store in search of sustenance.  I wasn't much interested in cooking, so I was considering a terribly wholesome meal along the lines of Robust Russet Cape Cod potato chips and medium cheddar cheese, but as I made the short drive to the local supermarket, I remembered that the store has prepared meal offerings which might be a somewhat more nutritious and satsifying alternative.

I still came home with the cheese and potato chips, which will most likely be staples of my diet for the rest of my life no matter what health questions they may raise, but there was also a container of vegetarian minestrone (which I have heard might be a bit of a redundant term) in my handy dandy reusable grocery bag.

As with most prepared meals, the vegetables in the soup had been cooked to the point of dissolution into the broth, so I rummaged in the refrigerator's vegetable bin and came up with a slightly wilted carrot and stalk of celery as well as a presentable zucchini to chop up and add to the ready made concoction.  A few minutes of simmering, and I had a tasty meal, with enough left over for lunch the following day.

Thus minestrone became my next cooking quest.  The Italian cookbooks on my shelf didn't offer any recipes which made me say to myself, "This is it!  I simply must prepare this recipe," so I wandered into cyberspace to see if I could find a more inspiring alternative.

My minimal exposure to the Food Network has made me a fan of Giada de Laurentiis, so I started with a Google search for Giada and minestrone.

The first result in the list was Winter Minestrone, and the second was Fish Minestrone with Herb Sauce.

Neither recipe was terribly complicated, and each sounded tasty, so I ended up trying them both.

Not surprisingly, I made a few substitutions and adjustments based on what I already had on hand.  I used homemade turkey stock rather than beef broth or chicken broth.  The winter minestrone got a half a cup or so of Merlot that I wanted to use up, and the fish minestrone got a about a cup of Riesling because I think that I have decided that most any non cream-based soup needs a bit of wine.  It makes all of the flavors meld so nicely.

I had bacon, so I used that for the winter minestrone rather than buying pancetta, and ended up reducing the amount of olive oil while I was at it.

Snapper was not readily available for the fish minestrone, so I went with haddock, and I didn't have the fresh ingredients for the herb sauce, so I made a bit of paste with the dried counterparts and stirred it into the whole pot rather than doling it out with individual servings.

One substitution I did not make because I wanted to make the soup the same day that I bought the ingredients was dry beans for canned beans.  I generally prefer dry beans even though they require soaking and cooking because I don't like the extra stuff in the can with the beans.  The garbanzos for the fish minestrone weren't to bad, but the white kidney beans for the winter minestrone had a rather unpleasant slime on them from.  Luckily a good portion of it insisted on sticking resolutely to the bottom of the can, so rinsing wasn't too much of an ordeal.  Still.  Ick.  Dry beans and planning ahead hence forth.

Canned bean slime aside, the end result was two satisfying soups to chase away the winter chill.

Less successful, however, was the second attempt at the chocolate cake described near the beginning of The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.

The first attempt was on Christmas Eve.  I dutifully followed the directions of baking for 35 minutes because of the added directive "Do not overbake."  Everything looked fine when I took it out of the over ... and twenty minutes later, I had a crater which crumbled to dust when touched.

This time around, I baked the cake for about fifty minutes.  It was still not nearly long enough, but at least the thing is edible this time.

Third time's the charm, right?  Perhaps for Easter.  Or the next time we have guinea pigs, er, guests.  In the meantime, I think I shall continue to focus on cooking rather than baking, except perhaps for bread, which I seem to be able to produce with reasonable consistency.