We'll Buy More Sunday Clothes

The sound of Sunday morning around my childhood home was filing-metal sound of Mom's spoon in the saucepan, stirring the jello until the ice cubes melted.  

By dinner time, a meatloaf showed up on the table, paired with some Rice-A-Roni, some peas, and that jello, and she considered her duty fulfilled.    

But Sundays require dessert, no? 

Mama didn't trouble herself with a lot of cooking experiments when it came to family meals.   (Which doesn't meant she wasn't adventurous.  There was her cake-decorating phase, her wedding-mint phase, her sugar-Easter-eggs phase, her goose-eggs-with-birds-and-bunnies-tableau-inside phase.)  But sometimes, you don't need much to keep your sweet tooth sweet.  A little of this:

topped with a spoonful of this:

And everybody's happy.

In my case, make it Cool Whip.  Unlike my mom, I don't have cows and a steady supply of cream just begging to be eaten up.

You can put your whipped creamy stuff on: 

APPLESAUCE CAKE

Or, put it on:

JELL-O CHOCOLATE PUDDING CAKE

1 pkg. (4-serving size) jello chocolate instant pudding and pie filling mix
1 pkg. (2-layer size) chocolate cake mix
4 eggs
1 cup water
1/4 cup oil

Blend all ingredients in large mixer bowl; then beat 2 minutes at medium speed. Bake in greased and floured 10-inch tube pan at 350' for 55 to 60 minutes, or until cake springs back when lightly pressed. Cool in pan 15 minutes; remove from pan. Sprinkle with confectioners sugar (1 TB).  Makes 16 servings at 225 calories each.  Not counting what you put on top of it all.

You don't suppose there's some unwitting theme here between Cool Whip and the book I'm about to hawk to you, a book about finding oil?  According to OrganicAuthority, "You don't even want to know what's in Cool Whip!"  Eat enough of its ingredients, they say, and you could end up with autism, prostate cancer (if you have a prostate), and lab rat tumors.

Their solution?  "The real stuff:   Homemade Vegan Whipped Cream."

Now, that's something I don't want to know about.

But yes, I'm reading Bryan Burrough's Big Rich and loving the tales of the four Texas men who struck oil bigtime.

There was the Sunday that the future tycoon felt sure his well would come in, so he, the wife and the little kids trooped out to the salt dome, still in their church clothes.  The drillers drilled.  They struck.  And they all danced as the black goo gushed toward the sky and rained back down on them.  What the heck?  We're rich!  We'll buy more Sunday clothes!

Then there are the boom towns, where maybe 5,000 people scratch at the earth to grow a little cotton.  Then somebody finds the oil and the population swells up to 50,000, with prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes (Burrough always mentions the prostitutes) tripping all over each other.  Naturally, there are not enough houses to put them in.  There are not enough hotel rooms. There are not enough tents.  Some people end up renting barber chairs for the night.

I haven't gotten far in Big Rich, but if the rest of the book is as good as these first chapters, floors just might not get mopped this week.  Dinners might not get cooked.  Towels may not get folded.   Bills may not get paid.

Oh, wait, I'd better not skip the bills.  Just because I'm reading about people with no money cares doesn't mean I'm one of them. 

Somewhere Between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen"

"Did you find everything all right today?" said the grocery store cashier.

"Yes, I did, and I was looking for a lot of weird stuff," I told her.

Like spreadable goat cheese.   And pesto.  And roasted red peppers.

We've got a Fast Sunday tradition around here of eating a big meal made made from all new recipes (also known as Dishwasher's Dismay). Currently, we're working our way through a magazine feature on tailgate meals.

You never know with new recipes whether the stuff will actually taste good.  But today was a winner!

Get yourself acquainted with the fancy-cheese section of your grocery and store and make:

Italian-Style Sandwiches

I found the roasted meat in the lunchmeat section, somewhere between plastic-packaged ham steaks and tubs of ready-made mashed potatoes.  The store didn't have ciabatta rolls, but I'm sure you can find something exotic to try.  As for arugula, I couldn't be bothered to hunt very hard.  Good old leaf lettuce did us fine.  Serves 4.  On 4-oz. rolls, our sandwiches came in at 820 calories each.

 Layered Cornbread Salad

We've featured another cornbread salad on Bye-Bye Nesquik before.  It remains our favorite, but today's is still good enough to make it onto the official Bye-Bye Nesquik master list. 

Once we'd had time to digest a little, we ate:

Pineapple Upside-Down Carrot Cake

Let's try the whole meal again sometime, and on an actual tailgate.  Or on a picnic table beside a river bend.  Or on a bench in Central Park.  Doesn't matter; just somewhere out there.  (Can you tell I'm dying for picnic weather?  I'm sure you are, too.)

I'm trying to distract you with a lot of cooking because I have not finished my current book, The Blithedale Romance  by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Hawthorne, as we've mentioned here before, is a tough row to hoe.  His language falls somewhere between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen."

But Blithedale is actually rather funny.  The  main character, a stand-in for Hawthorne, plays the smart-mouthed grump in this tale of Boston elites intruding themselves on plain country folk.

Hawthorne based the story on his days at Brook Farm, an experiment in socialist living.  He and his artist friends conceived the idea of living off the land.  They believed they would achieve a form of moral justice, with some time on the side for writing poems and painting landscapes.

After a summer of shoveling a great deal of manure, and no time to write so much as a paragraph, the disillusioned Hawthorne hasted himself back to Boston to take up his former studious life.

I could've told him things would end that way.

I"m Taking This Lady to the Beach

It's the book cover that got me.

It sat on the endcap of the library shelves and, after a winter of heavy reading, I needed a little fluff.  So I plucked Beth Kendrick's The Week Before the Wedding off its little display shelf and took it home.

I whipped pretty quickly through this story about a woman all set to marry a surgeon, at a cute little inn in Vermont no less.  And then, her ex-husband shows up.  He was a college boyfriend, the biggest mistake of her impulsive youth.  But he's all grown up now, and he produces movies.

I could see it on the Lifetime channel.  No, wait.  Lifetime movies are downers, wherein beautiful women meet perfectly nice men who turn out to be psychos.  So let's say Hallmark channel, instead.  Maybe the story started a little rough, with college kids that sound like they're thirty, and maybe the end got all sicky-sweet, when she decided that her true love was . . . nope, better not spoil it for you.   But in between, with a cast that includes a flashy, four-times-married mother, a proper pearl necklace mother-in-law, some catty aunts and a stepsister who thinks nothing is a good time unless it includes tequila and half-naked men,  Kendrick wrote a lot of snappy lines which any Hallmark-channel actor will be proud to utter. 

Amazon readers say the cover picture is what drew them in, too.  They say it was a great beach read.  That's good to know.  I've got a beach day in my future and I think Miss Kendrick needs to come along with me.  Which of her other books should I try?   The Pre-Nup?  Exes and Ohs?  The Lucky Dog Matchmaking Service?

As for good eating, here's a simple little cake that would look very plain-Jane next to all the other confections on Pinterest, but oh my, it's hard to stop at one piece.  So I didn't.

Chocolate Appesauce Cake

Maiden Voyage

Look at my new toy--holds 7 quarts!

It got a workout tonight.  We invited a family of beautiful children and their charming parents to join us for dinner.  In addition, our kids came home for the week--Yay!  This qualifies as feeding a crowd, no?

On its maiden voyage, the crock pot cooked a double batch of:

Italian Bow Tie Supper

For dessert:

Pineapple Layer Cake


I consider company for dinner as my reward for finishing Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb.  Despite a book jacket of shiny Christmas tree balls, the story was only vaguely about Christmas.   Mostly it was a profane little comedy about fifth-grade boys clashing with the nuns at their school.  The protagonist hangs out with the class slacker, a 12-year-old already carrying condoms in his back pocket.  You are forewarned. 

On this Thanksgiving week, may you load up on happy memories as least as much as you load up on stuffing and pie.  As for me, my house is is full of people to cook for, which is one of my reasons for living, if you haven't guessed that already. 

Chocolate Sales are Up. No, Down. No, Up.

We're talking chocolate tonight.

We can start off with the recipe for CHOCOLATE-DATE-COCONUT CAKE.

1 cup chopped dates
1 cup hot water
1 3/4 cup flour
3 TB cocoa
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup flaked coconut

Cover dates with water in small bowl; set aside.  Stir together flour, cocoa and baking soda; set aside.  cream butter, sugar and vanilla until fluffy.  Beat in eggs one at a time until well blended.  Stir in flour mixture alternately with reserved dates and water until well blended.  Stir in 1/2 cup chocolate chips.  Pour into greased 13x9 baking pan.  Sprinkle with remaining chocolate chips and the coconut.  Bake in preheated 350' oven 40 minutes or until it passes toothpick test.  Cool on rack.  Serves 12, 455 cals. ea. 



Back when I was a teenager who didn't know how horrible I looked in pink, my mom used to buy Woman's Day magazine at the check-out.  Every issue included a little insert on dull, rough paper, "Collector's Cookbook."  Each insert featured a theme, i.e. peanuts, casseroles, bar cookies, and I would mine these little booklets for recipes to try.  (Thank you, LD, for patiently eating the Peanut Soup).

It was such a rich motherlode, I couldn't try it all fast enough.  So I stuffed recipes into my file box.  We're not talking google or cut or paste here.  We're talking typing it out on cards, on a typewriter that was older than Social Security, mind you, and leaving the errors in (baking sida anyone?) because they were such a headache to correct.

Nor were these little booklets brightened up with pictures of the recipes.  I think there were drawings, artfully arranged sketches of eggs or tomatoes or other ingredients.  And anyway, if I saw a picture of the above-mentioned cake, I doubt I would have exclaimed, "Oh, I have to make that!"   No, it's not really a looker.

But I took a chance on this silly little cake (Dates?  Where'm I gonna find those?  What do they look like?) carried it off to a family reunion and, after the first piece, kept going back for more.   


And we're talking chocolate because, over on the Finished Book Pile sits Robert Cormier's Chocolate War.    I believe this is the first banned book we've featured at Bye-Bye Nesquik.  Set in a New England Catholic school, it tells the tale of a freshman boy who refuses to sell in the school's annual chocolate sale.


It's Lord of the Flies, preppie edition.  The boys are beasts--cruel, profane, sex-charged.  The ones who aren't cruel are cowards.  The ones who aren't cruel or cowardly are . . . well, I can't give that away.

If you want a clean story, this isn't it.  But Cormier, a reporter, crafted a fascinating tale, which kept me up waaaay late. 

Which paved the way for me to start in on Anthony Elliott's Making the Cut:  How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives.  

I'll bet you're thinking it's a pretty juicy read.  In Elliott's hands, not so much.  He can be awfully academic about the whole thing.  And if I had an M&M for every time he used the word "celebrity," I'd be lying here, surrounded by a few empty party-sized bags.

He reports that women are going in to their doctors and asking for Angelina Jolie's lips and cheeks.  Really?  They think they can be changed from Betty Blah to Petunia Perfect?  There's only so much you can do to catch up to the genetically blessed.  However, if you've got a body part or two that bothers you, it can certainly be improved.   Not made into Cher/Angelina/Princess Di.  Just improved.

I'll confess:  I've dabbled in this stuff.  Was it because I wanted to look like Cher/Angelina/Princess Di?  I don't think so.  We all know they're from an outer galaxy of loveliness, surrounded by make-up artists, Pilates coaches and frightfully-priced hairdressers.  What they have, we can't get.  


But when I'm out on the street, following some girl who has perfectly smooth legs, and I can see that, yes, real people are built like that, I start to covet. 

But that may be part of Elliott's point.  When cosmetic surgery infiltrates the culture, how do you know whether the smooth legs you see on the street were born that way, or doctored?

Elliott included a most interesting chapter on surgical tourism.   Book your makeover in Malaysia, enjoy sun, sand and ocean as you relax and recover far from your daily cares.   Tell you what:  I doubt you'll step on to the beach.  I doubt you'll even look out the window of your luxury medical suite.  Bruised, swollen and sore, you will be saying "AAghghhg" as you ease yourself upright to eat your medical jello.    

Finally, I found myself a lovely spot to open up a third book this week.  Parked in front of the monastery in quaint little Oldenburg, Indiana, "village of spires,"  I opened up Mary Gaitskill's short story collection, Don't Cry.  The first story was a parade of puzzling, unappealing 20-somethings.  I enjoyed none of it.  Is it better to sit in a dirty diner, reading Tom Wolfe?   Or to sit on Main Street in a town like Mayberry (but with spires), wishing to toss a book into the trunk?

At least the monastery's stone walls and shady lawn were lovely.  And I got a nice Opie vibe from watching a kid bounce his basketball down the sidewalk. 


 

Your Beautiful City

The Tabernacle Choir visited us on Friday.

They arrived in town a day early, which left them a few spare hours to visit "your beautiful city."  Now this could just be a load of flattery; audiences eat that kind of thing up.  How easy is it to say "your beautiful city" and "your wonderful museums"?  You could talk that way about any city (except East St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey) while holing up in your hotel room and eating from the vending machines.

So I just want to pin them down on this.  Which museums and monuments did they see?  Which neighborhoods did they wander?   

But they're right.  Even without hills or a stunning body of water, we look pretty good.  And we are a shocking green this year, which is a few shades more brilliant than the ordinary Midwestern green.  For sure it's a whole lot more picturesque than, say, Point of the Mountain, or the lonely wastes between Snowville and Burley. 

And let me just counter-flatter those choir members and say, "Your Western landscape abounds in dramatic vistas and your sprawling city is eminently walkable."

There.  I guess we're even now.

Let's all be glad none of us have to put up with the landscape Jonathan Raban writes about in The Bad Lands.   The British Raban visited the eastern end of Montana where the prairie is wide and featureless.   He found prairie grass, miles of it, rolling off into the horizon. 

He tackled the question, Why did people come here? The railroads turn up as the culprit.  As they laid their lines westward, they needed markets to justify their existence.  Using weather facts from a few especially wet years, they published leaflets full of glowing promises, luring the land-hungry to the homesteading life.   As it turned out, the climate was not really that wet.  If the settlers crops didn't fail, then they went crazy from all the prairie grass which, thanks to its vastness and monotony, made humans feel lost.  

Funny thing:  check a map of neighboring North Dakota (we all remember what maps are, don't we?) and all the little what-for towns are spaced at uncannily even intervals, like somebody planned it that way.  Just to, I don't know, fill up their railroad trains with water, maybe?  Oh, and unload a few orders from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.  

A few homesteaders made it work.  But a whole lot didn't, adding sad little ruined houses to the landscape, their doors flapping in the wind.

But not to leave you on a total downer, some people find ways to be happy on their lonely homesteads.  All the Taste of Home recipes I share with you come from real people who live in real towns.  We have some lady in Wyoming to thank for:

Chocolate Mint Layer Cake 

I made it today and it looked just like the picture.  

A hahahahahah!  OK, it didn't.  My problem was that very melty chocolate frosting.  When I spread it on the sides of the cake, the whipped-cream filling, um, got involved.  These little accidents have never stopped us before from enjoying chocolate lusciousness, but I still look longingly at the picture and wonder how many cakes it took until they achieved such bake-shop perfection.  

The Nobleman's Hobby

The picture on the cover has all the dark tones of a portrait of royalty, the kind hanging along the main hallway of the palace. The man on the cover wears a coat that drapes to the floor. And a bonnet with a ruffled edge. And he's pregnant.

Oh, oh, wait, that's not a man? It's a woman, the mistress of a Russian nobleman? Well, clearly beauty standards have changed since the 1780s.

The Pearl by Douglas Smith attempts a biography of Praskovia, the daughter of a blacksmith, given away to serfdom at the estate of the rich playboy Nicholas Sheremetev. Sheremetev just couldn't seem to fall in love with anybody of his own class, because that pretty little servant girl in his house captivated him so.

She became the nobleman's hobby.

Not only was she considered a great beauty in her day. She also sang like an angel. Nicholas built theaters for her to perform in. He had his friends order the latest plays from Paris, complete with costumes and intricate stage drawings.

Which became the nobleman's other hobby. I can't tell which he loved better. But he managed to fit them together nicely.

The love story failed to draw me in. But I really liked the chapter on serf theater. Theater as I know it always suffers from high competition (in the professional ranks) and absenteeism from rehearsals (in the amateur ranks). Pharmacists and school teachers can't seem to find the time to be dancing dandies. And this is not to mention funding, in both ranks. Wouldn't it be nice if a nobleman took it on himself to build the house, underwrite the costumes, invite his friends (the tsar, the empress, etc) to watch the show? Wouldn't it be wonderful if he pulled you out of your parlor duties and sent you to the singing and dancing lessons that readied you for the stage?

Well, maybe not. The serfs still had to serve dinner to The tsar, the empress and the rest of the company, before donning their costumes and make-up. And sometimes the master sat out in the audience, heckling you. Can't you hit the high notes? Look at the clumsy way you dance! And you couldn't slap him, couldn't walk off to the next town, couldn't do anything but throw in a couple ad-lib lines with veiled but pointed meaning, for which you would probably be punished later.

It was a pretty good chapter. It just didn't redeem the whole biography. And Smith had pretty vague information to go on anyway.

I tried hard, but never finished his opus.

But here is something we did finish around here:

BLACK FOREST BROWNIE TORTE

1 pkg (19.8 oz.) brownie mix plus ingredients to prepare cake-like verson of mix
1 can (21 oz.) cherry pie filling, divided
2 1/2 c. Cool Whip, thawed, divided
1/4 c. sliced almonds, toasted @ 325' for 6-8 min.

-- Heat oven to 350'. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans. Prepare brownie mix, cake-like version.
-- Divide batter evenly between pans. Bake 18-20 min. Do not overbake. Cool 10 minutes. Remove from pans to wire rack to cool completely.
-- Place one brownie layer on serving plate. Top with 1 1/2 c. Cool Whip to within 1/2 inch of edge. Spread 1 cup pie filling over Cool Whip.
-- Top with second brownie layer. Spread remaining pie filling to within 1/2 inch of edge. Dollop or pipe remaining 1 cup Cool Whip around edge of torte. Sprinkle toasted almonds over top. Serve by cutting into wedges with large serrated knife. 12 servings @ 385 cals. each.

My family wouldn't have had a chance to eat this had not fate intervened.
I made this beauty for the ward Christmas party. Not even the fact that one of the brownie layers fell slightly apart defeated me. That was an easy repair.

But those finishing touches, oh my! I had nothing to pipe with, so we went with the dollops. And they simply could not wait to droop over the sides of the cake. They did not care that they had to appear in public, passing under the noses of a couple dessert snobs, whose own tortes always look like poufy party dresses.

I snuck it in to the church and opened the cake carrier to have a look (things sounded kind of slide-y on the car ride). Oh dear. I snuck it back out again.

Emma says I shouldn't have had such pride. "It's probably perfectly good eating."

Uh-huh. And what was she complaining about? Now we had this wounded but tasty confection all to ourselves. So sad, heh-heh.

Dud Pile

Winter has set in, as you know, and I'm dying to escape it, even if it's just in the pages of a book. Sadly, the books I have chosen lately were a pile of duds. So let's just dive in to the Finished Book Pile today and express our frustrations, OK?

This pile of duds included Dangerous Laughter, a collection of short stories by Stephen Millhauser. These are odd little stories. In one, a fad of laughter spreads through a group of young teens. Yep, that's what they get together to do, laugh until they grow hysterical and spent. In another story, a small town constructs an exact replica of itself somewhere on its own outskirts. Dozens of civic employees work constantly to keep up with all the small changes. If somebody moves a doily in the real town, a worker moves the same doily over in the replica town. Citizens of the real town visit the replica whenever they wish, wandering through the bedrooms of their neighbors' "houses."

Where does all this come from? The author, a professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, must be lost in some mighty strange thoughts as he moseys along on the sidewalks to and from campus. We've reviewed two other Millhauser book on this blog, Edwin Mullhouse (which was good in a quirky way) and Martin Dressler.

But maybe you like strange stories. I was not thrilled and, in fact, gave up near the end.

Next up, and another strange one, is The Hunters by Claire Messud. I've read and loved Messud before and, like Millhauser above, must have read her best stuff first. I certainly don't remember all the maddening, writerly affectations that I found in this book: In every sentence, she'd capture my interest, then take off, inserting new clauses between everything, side trips if you will, and by the time she returned to the main thrust of her sentence, it had grown as thick as a mega-burger, one of those things you can't get your mouth around.

This little book contained two novellas. The first was the story of a woman who escaped WWII and lived out her remaining years in Toronto. In the second, a New England professor (man or woman? Messud never tells us) stays in London for a summer, his/her peace disturbed by a pesky neighbor. The New York Times called it "Exceptional, a work of near-miraculous perfection." I call it "Huh?" Baffling, inconclusive, no pay-off.

My dear Claire M., I liked you so much in The Emperor's Children. What gives?

Finally, I embarked upon Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and then un-embarked upon it. It was about . . . um . . . um . . . Sadly, nothing about this book stuck with me. There was a man in it, a proper sort of gentleman, toting his umbrella with him as he walked about in New York. There were his memories--some time in WWII as a Jewish refugee, some time in London. There were pages and pages of his philosophy.

So, a pile of books having failed to save me from winter's dullness, I tried inviting friends over instead. It worked much better, thank you. These particular friends told a pile of amusing stories, quite a few of them about a back-country ward where they used to live. Journal-worthy events happened every Sunday. "Yep, there was the time I had to break up a fistfight in Elder's Quorum."

We ate:

Sweet 'n Spicy Chicken

Dad's Favorite Salad

Buttery Rolls  (We've already featured this one, but it's worth a repeat).




White Cake with Raspberry Sauce (except we used strawberries, since John doesn't like raspberry seeds)


It was an easy and yummy dinner.

And I promise, the next pile of books will be better.

The Last Person in the 50 States to . . .

OK, I'm pretty sure I'm the last person in the whole United States to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

But just in case I'm not the last, let me tell you that you will, like about 12 million other people, enjoy reading about Minny, the big-mouth maid who gets fired for doing something Terrible/Awful to her employer. (The Terrible/Awful wasn't what I expected. It was better.)

You will enjoy reading about Hilly, the queen bee of the Jackson, Mississippi Junior League.

You will like Skeeter, the too-tall white girl with the frizzy hair, who gets an idea that seemed a little contrived as a plot device but eventually earned its keep.

You will enjoy riding the bus home with the maids and hearing them talk about the white people they serve.

Yep, it's no wonder you have to fight for a place in the long line at your library to read this book.

In honor of Minny, the big-mouth maid who makes the best caramel cake in the world, I offer you:

Banana Fudge Cake


We recently enjoyed this cake in honor of a certain two-year-old's birthday. The honoree, upon arriving at his beloved grandma's house, ignored his grandma and went straight for the big red box with the picture of a trike on it. I do believe that helping grandpa assemble the trike was the most fun he had all day. He carried wheel parts around. He brandished screwdrivers. He checked grandpa's work and made sure grandpa stayed on the job.

When the trike was all done, so was dinner. But do you think we could get him to sit down for some macaroni and cheese? Nooooo.

Really, I don't know what else we could expect from the little fellow.

He can't even reach the pedals yet. But that doesn't stop him from (as Emma put it) Fred-Flintstoning his way across the floor.

He was, however, willing to take a break for a piece of this cake.

God on the Quad

Today we feature my birthday dinner, which I cooked myself, not that I minded one little bit. We had:

POTLUCK EGGS BENEDICT

1 16-oz. can green beans
3/4 cup margarine
3/4 c. flour
4 c. milk
1 can (14 1/2 oz.) chicken broth
1 lb. cubed cooked ham
1 c. (4 oz.) shredded cheddar cheese
8 hard-cooked eggs, sliced
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
10-12 biscuits, warmed

Melt butter in saucepan; stir in flour until smooth. Add milk & broth; bring to a boil. Cook and stir for 2 minutes. Add ham & cheese, stir until cheese melt (do not boil after the cheese is in; nasty things will happen). Add eggs, salt, cayenne & green beans; heat through. Serve over biscuits. YIELD: 10-12 servings @ 295 cals each, if you divide it twelve ways. And not counting the biscuits.

Any of you who have eaten real Eggs Benedict may wonder why this is so far from the real thing. Well, the real thing has asparagus, doesn't it? I've checked myself over, trying to detect a desire to eat asparagus, and the desire is just not there. Therefore, the green beans.

The birthday cake was:

THIRTY-MINUTE COCOA CAKE

1 cups (2 sticks) butter or margarine
1/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/3 cup buttermilk or sour milk*
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
Quick Cocoa Frosting**

In medium saucepan, combine margarine, cocoa and water; bring to boil over medium heat, cooking until butter is melted; set aside. In large mixing bowl, stir togetehr sugar, flour, soda, and cinnamon. Add cocoa mixture; blend. (Save cocoa pan, unwashed, for making Quick Cocoa Frosting.) Beat together buttermilk and eggs; stir into batter. Add vanilla. Pour into ungreased 15x11 jelly roll pan. Bake at 400' for 20 minutes. Five minutes before cake is done, begin to make Quick Cocoa Frosting. Frost cake as soon as it comes from oven.
*Note: To make sour milk, measure 1/2 TB vinegar into measuring cup; add enough milk to make 1/2 cup. Allow to stand for 5 minutes.
**Quick Cocoa Frosting: In medium saucepan combine 1/2 cup (1 stick) margarine, 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, and 1/3 cup milk. Bring to boil; simmer 3 minutes; remove from heat. Stir in 3 1/2 cups (1 pound) powdered sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla; beat until smooth. Pour over cake. Whole cake is 6650 calories. My recipe source (Winifred Jardine's Managing Your Meals) suggested adding raisins to the frosting, or even topping the cake with nuts. But why ruin a good cake?

As for the Finished Book Pile, we knocked off two works of non-fiction and one work of rather dated silliness. But here goes:

Naomi Schaefer Riley visited twenty religious colleges in America, including BYU and SVU and wrote God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. For one thing, it was refreshing to read about people who actually want to be good. All these colleges have a few things in common: rules about dating and drinking, a tendency against political protest and certainly an interest in how to blend sacred and secular knowledge. Baylor University, in Texas, loosened its ties to its Southern Baptist Convention out of a fear that their more fundamentalist wing might exercise tighter control over the school. Baylor wants to be religiously observant, but it wants to be a first-rate university, too. Indeed, that is something all the colleges on Schaefer Riley's tour sought after: academic respect. There are probably dozens more religious colleges out there that really don't measure up.

As for blending secular and religious learning, she says, "Cultural discernment, that is, teaching students the best of what secular culture has to offer and providing them with the tools for examining it themselves, requires constant vigilance and a lot of forethought from religious college leaders, but the rewards for success are tremendous. Striking the right balance means producing graduates who are unafraid of the world, can participate in some aspects of it, change other parts of it, and all the while maintain their religious grounding."

Schaefer Riley is Jewish. Her tour of colleges included Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish and even Buddhist schools.

Next up: Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz. This book is part of a series of "A Walk Through . . ." Kotlowitz writes about Chicago. The other Walk-Through books feature places like Rome, Nantucket, even Portland, OR.

Kotlowitz takes the reader into parts of Chicago I'm sure I would never have gone on my own. The whole book is little close-up portraits of city personalities. He portrays artists whose work is ignored in their hometown, but loved in Paris; a woman who owns a diner; a pugnacious man who fights mob-controlled cronyism in the suburb of Cicero.

Kotlowitz's politics become obvious to the reader right away. He hails from people who enjoy a good sit-in or a nice brick-throwing union riot.

And finally, I read Mr. Dooley's Opinions by Finley Peter Dunne. I don't remember where I got Dunne's name, but he is one of those writers that you might have known about had you been around to vote for Teddy Roosevelt. Dunne has since slipped into obscurity--deep obscurity. Opinions was a volume of sketches between Dooley and his friend Hennessy. Think of the old hecklers in The Muppet Show. Give them an Irish brogue and there you have it.

Actually, I couldn't take all the Dooley stories at once. I had to break them up with some other short stories, so I dipped into some John Updike, some Raymond Carver and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." I really liked O'Brien's story about Vietnam soldiers. Look it up.

Prom Dining at the Food Court?

Ah, Memorial Day. Best one in a long time. Mercy introduced us to Bexley, where the streets are shady, the vast lawns are landscaped by skilled hands, the driveways are long, curving, bricked, and the houses -- excuse me -- the manors are dignified. At one of the larger ones, I expected Captain Von Trapp to pop around the corner and scowl at me.

That is not all. We found what appears to be the favorite mall of Columbus' teenage girls. At one table in the food court, eight kids were dressed for prom night--sequins and dramatic eyeliner on the girls, bow ties and nervous clowning on the boys. A few tables away, another young group dressed for the Goth prom looked like they were all peeved at each other.

On Monday, Mercy directed us to a shady park. We met Martha and her boys. We ate. And here is what we ate, so you can eat it too:

Curry Chicken Croissants

Country Baked Beans


Fruit Salad w/ Apricot Dressing

COCOA FUDGE CAKE (It was John's birthday. Thanks, John, for giving us an excuse to eat cake)
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla

Heat oven to 350'. Spray a 9x13-in. pan with PAM. Beat all ingredients in large mixer bowl on low speed, scraping bowl constantly, 30 seconds. Beat on high speed, scraping bowl occasionally 3 minutes. Pour into pan.

Bake until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes; cool. Frost with Vanilla Butter Frosting.


VANILLA BUTTER FROSTING

3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup margarine
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
About 2 TB milk

Mix all ingredients until frosting is smooth and of spreading consistency.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, I really have finished Alice Munro's View From Castle Rock by now. In the second half, I liked "Hired Girl" and "Home."

"Hired Girl" is one of those stories that, while I read it, I kept saying, "Yep, that's the way it is." The young heroine spends the summer working for people that own an island. In her mind, she's a person. But when she prepares lunch one day for the mistress, the mistress' daughter and herself, she carries the three plates out to the patio. "Oh, no, no," says the mistress. "Only two plates. You'll be eating in the kitchen." Great examination of class boundaries.

"Home" is the kind of story that, while I read it, I wondered how it would have been if it had happened in our family. The narrator visits home. Her mother has died. Her father has re-married. The sights along the route are the same, the kitchen is the same, but the table and chairs have been moved to the barn, the front rooms re-papered. "I don't go into the front room now to rummage in the piano bench for old photographs and sheet music. . . . The books that used to lie under beds and on tables all over the house have been corralled by Irlma, chased and squeezed into this front-room bookcase, glass doors shut upon them." It was a story about change, and what the changes say about who is in charge, about who hangs on to sentimental feelings and who lets them go.

No cow patties in Munro's stories, only some strong whiffs.