Sneaky, Snaky Behavior

"I can see you want everything, . . . [k]ids, husband, career. The whole superwoman thing."

So says one character to another in Rachel Pastan's Lady of the Snakes.

Pastan's novel begins when Jane, the aspiring superwoman, gives birth to a daughter. She loves the little tyke, of course. But after a couple weeks of the foreignness of motherhood, Jane longs to get back to her dissertation. That is when she discovers that it isn't easy to get much done with an infant around. As for Billy, Jane's husband, his life doesn't change much.

Jane writes her dissertation on the wife of a second-string Russian novelist. While he went about philandering, his wife bore him seven or so children. The more Jane reads the woman's letters and diaries, the mores she sees how all the heroines in the husband's novels looked and sounded a lot like the wife. And on her worst days, mind you.

What a cad.

And maybe a plagiarist, too, for by the time Jane snags a prestigious professor job, her close reading of Mrs. Russian-Novelist's letters turn up passages that Jane feels she has read before. Say, in the husband's novels.

If she thinks she's going to expose all this cribbing, she will have to get past an aging colleague who built his reputation on showcasing the Russian novelist's "brilliance." The intrigue between Jane and her nemesis resembles the race between Channel 5 and Channel 8, each trying to scoop the other.  And Jane fights with a handicap: when things fall apart at home, who has to drop the meetings and the research trips?  Billy?  Or Jane?


Lady of the Snakes can be a challenging read. Pastan weaves in long quotes from the fictional novelist and his wife. Eventually, this device kills the pace of the story. Still, Pastan tackles the differences between men and women, what they can accomplish, who gets credit and who bears the burden of distraction.

The only thing getting scooped around here today was cookie dough. I worry that I should be sharing recipe adventures, some creation for which I ground the vanilla beans myself. But really, have you ever seen anybody turn down a chocolate chip cookie?

PEANUT BUTTER 'N CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter 

1 cup granulated sugar 

1 cup firmly packed brown sugar 

1/2 cup peanut butter 

2 eggs 

2 tsp. vanilla 

2 1/2 cups flour 

1 tsp. baking soda 

1/2 tsp. salt 

1 package (11.5 oz.) milk chocolate chips 

Heat oven to 350'. 

Beat butter, sugars and peanut butter in large bowl with mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy. Blend in eggs and vanilla. Mix in flour, baking soda and salt. Stir in chips. 

Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. 

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool 2 minutes; remove from cookie sheets onto wire racks. 

This recipe comes from a Parkay box, long long ago.

Rusty, Rusty, When Will You Learn?

Remember Lawyer Rusty?  Accused of murder?  Guilty of canoodling with the Boy with Breasts?

Well, we're back to him this week.  In Scott Turow's Innocent, the sequel to Presumed Innocent, Rusty is now sixty years old.  He's a respected judge in Kindle County.  He wakes up one day to find that his wife has died beside him.

He sits with her for 24 hours, absorbing this event, before he calls any authorities.

And somebody in the prosecutor's office thinks that is . . . odd.

Meanwhile, Rusty has ensnared himself in another affair, which heightens the suspicion around him.  And this affair leads to a tangled web of human relationships where, unlike the first Turow book, all the parties are actually warm and real and likeable.  Oh, except for that prosecutor, who is just sure something ain't right here.

I really would like the hungry cats and the church meetings and stack of unpaid bills to go away right now so I can curl up with Rusty's story.  What will happen when all the people in this tangled web find out about each other?  I am torn with suspense. 

As soon as things quiet down tonight, I'll be right back in Turow's book, possibly munching one of these  Mississippi Mud Cookies as I follow Rusty's troubles from page to page:

NOTE: These were extra soft cookies.  It worked best to keep them on the cookie sheet for 10-15 minutes after baking before removing them.   Also, the published recipe called for parchment paper-lined baking sheets. Is this a new rule in baking?   I'll have to study up. 

Waiting for the Axe in the Skyscraper

OK, I haven't exactly finished this one yet, but I'm in that part where the remaining pages are so few, they're thinner than a dinner napkin.  (Virtually speaking.  I'm reading it on Kindle.)    I think that's far enough along to have gotten the drift of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, don't you?

Ferris's characters work at a Chicago ad agency.  They're living the good life, getting paid an awful lot, which they pour straight into their mortgages out in Naperville.

Then the agency loses business and starts letting people go.   This is a situation where you want to look busy, seeing as how unbusy = expendable.   One character brings his library book, photocopies the entire tome, then sits down to read the pile at his desk, looking very busy indeed as he flips thoughtfully from page to page.  

They meet in one office or another to gossip.  They secretly write screenplays.  They steal one another's office chairs and antidepressants.  If somebody mentions donuts they all roll, like marbles in a box, straight for the break room.

Their female boss "was intimidating, mercurial, unapproachable, fashionable and consummately professional.  She was not a big woman--in fact, she was rather petite--but when we thought of her from home at night, she loomed large."

These smart, overpaid lemmings make for a pretty amusing read as they all await their fate on the increasingly empty fifty-ninth through sixty-second floors of their heart-of-Chicago skyscraper.  At least, it's amusing to me this year.  We've had some years where lay-off humor wasn't the least bit funny.

Some language cow patties, a whole lot of characters to juggle, but I think you'll catch on.

If I wanted to put off work like Ferris's ad-agency crew (and I am way too good at putting off work), I'd make some:

Chocolate Truffle Cookies 

Naturally, you will have to hide these well if you want enough to get you through a week's worth of procrastination.  I could suggest some good hiding spots, but that would be giving away my secrets, wouldn't it? 

The Week of the Clenched Stomach

It started when I stayed up late last Sunday, reading some doom and gloom on the internet. Fortified by visions of a dire future, I trudged into a week in which:

Bombs went off. Chemicals exploded. The daughter crashed her car. Tech problems up-ended the husband's workweek. A friend's mom died. Thunder crashed. Streams flooded. The toddler got defiant. And finally, PMS.

You'd think I would appreciate a gentle book like And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. But I avoided it. If it had been a book where bombs went off and thunder crashed, I probably couldn't have put it down.

Lusseyran grew up in Paris. He lost his sight in a childhood accident. After the initial shock and pain, he found himself endowed with something he described as "light." He gained a heightened sense of the objects around him, their smells, sounds, even the very pressure from the space they took up. His parents rose to the occasion, securing an education that fit him for the larger world. His friends held his arm and guided him along on their adventures. In short, God did not abandon Lusseyran to bleakness.

But I still felt no compulsion to read. His "light" was an intangible thing, harder to describe than smell. Really, how would you convey the scent of a carnation or of campfire smoke to someone who had never experienced it? If it's tough to describe, it's tough to read.

I've stuck with him now up to age eleven. I'll keep trying. World War II and his days in the French Resistance lie ahead, so surely I will stumble into suspense and adventure soon.

Look at me, wishing suspense and adventure on people in book-world, but not on people in real-world.

And furthermore, why don't stress-riven characters in books snitch Peanutty Chocolate Cookies, like I did all week?

Wait for the Movie

You are a graffiti artist. The city is on to your tricks and sends crews out to clean up your artwork, almost by the next morning. Nearly all the walls in your city neighborhood have now been declared, by city ordinance, off-limits.

You wake up one morning, go out on the street and see a stunning new work of graffiti on one of the forbidden walls. Upon closer examination, you discover that it is an advertisement for Tylenol. Who did this and why did they get away with it? And does Tylenol think they can fool you this way?

Anne Elizabeth Moore's Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity is all about how marketing execs find new ways to sneak their messages into your world. Or, more specifically, into Moore's world. She belongs to the original punk movement. Over there in punk-world, they have vowed to live with integrity, free from the influence of corporations. Oh, but those clever people at Nike, Tylenol and Toyota--they have their ways!

This is a book that would make a riveting documentary. Or a week of documentaries, given all the material Moore covers in here. But it's a tough read, especially since, unlike the author, my integrity isn't all that offended.

May I, instead, recommend to you the park bench where I read one of Moore's chapters? It was in Cincinnati. It overlooked a deep bend in the Ohio River. Teenagers, day tourists and limping grandmothers came and went while I fought my way through Moore's indignant prose.

One man parked himself two benches away and studied, with his binoculars, everything from the sailboat masts upriver to the toy houses on the Kentucky side. Then four giggling girls approached him. Would he please be in a quick little video with them? They all lined up and did a choo-choo train dance while a mom recorded it. Then he returned to his seat, smiling, and said, "I haven't moved like that in years."

So, nice park. Just take a better book.

And it wouldn't hurt to bring along a couple of these:

Double Chip Cookies

Shallow Beauty

I want to cut my hair in a bob and get myself a diaphanous dress. That's what I get for reading Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil. Set in the 1920s among British colonials off doing their job in Hong Kong, Veil tells the story of Kitty Fane, who marries in haste, then takes comfort in the arms of a dashing colonial officer.

Midway through the story, Kitty risks becoming a decent person. This slim tale, told in a spare and serious tone, is actually more fun when Kitty is shallow.

No cow patties, which is amazing, given the subject.

And speaking of shallow things, I know people pay tribute to true beauty and deep beauty but, face it, shallow beauty makes for much better stories. And let's not blame our culture for shallow beauty's grip on our eyes. Nope, it is bred right into our genes. A certain little boy I know possessed an eye for beauty long before he tasted his first solid food. He could pick out the prettiest girl in the room and flash her his biggest smile. If his studio-shot pictures came back with a particularly happy face, I knew the photographer must have been quite a looker.

And speaking of the shallow versus the deep and the true, we feature a dessert that tastes like a granola bar, except that it's redeemed by a whole lot of chocolate.

In fact, in the last granola bar commercial I saw, the voice-over preached the bars' virtues--the fiber, the nutrients--while the camera came in close on its vices--thick scoops of peanut butter, slow-mo shots of a stream of dripping chocolate. This, my friends, was food porn.

Those granola bars couldn't be much worse than Chocolate Oatmeal Bars: 

I suppose any candy bar will do. I'd better make them again soon, with Butterfingers, just to make sure. :-)

Bathrobe Day

April 27th --

Today, we have a big, thick one on the Finished Book Pile, The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton.

This is an older book, written when I was just a twinkle in my father's eye. But good story-telling never gets old. The book revisits the horses, lanterns and cloaks era, lots of "prithee" and "forsooth," which is always nice to get back to once in a while.

Seton set her story in England when matters between the king and the Puritans reached an impasse, prompting the Puritans to sail off to the New World. I think they expected gentle English meadows. What they got was a howling wilderness, a challenging place indeed.

Not that the story dwelt on the perils of pioneering. No, no, it was pulled along by plenty of frustrated romance. Then, somewhere in the middle, our Winthrop Woman is accused of being a witch, which made for some dull and improbable reading, since her accusers came off like cardboard characters. And I said, "Prithee, whence wenteth the frustrated romance?"

But then a hero from early in the story rode into town and the romantic stuff took off again.

So, even though my bathroom needed a thorough cleaning, the sheets needed to be changed, and I should have made a grocery list and written a couple thank-you notes and--whoopsie! Did I say I would call the people I visit teach tonight?--it was just . . . you know, sometimes you reach the point when you're so hooked, you just have to toss the to-do list and read those last 100 pages.

Yep, I spent the day in my bathrobe, with yesterday's mascara ringed around my eyes, turning the yellowed pages. And it was worth it!

The shame of it all is that my husband works at home. What's he to think when he's on the south side of the house being industrious and finds me on the north side, being hopelessly indolent? And he knows I'll be indolent again because, as I write this, the Royal Wedding is a couple days away and there I'll be, on the couch, remote in hand, hour upon hour. I promised him I'd at least make dinner on Royal Wedding day and he just laughed.

May 1st --

Ha! Yes, I did come through with dinner on Royal Wedding Day. Why, friends and family came over to watch it (I TiVoed it on two channels). I couldn't let them starve!

We ate:

Savory Beef Fajitas

Chocolate Oat Squares


We rounded out the meal with chips and salsa, and fresh pineapple. And leftover Easter candy. And doughnuts.

It was a day of decadence. But we got the Prince married off.

Dreaming of Chocolate Lumps

Nesquik is my user name all over the internet and it's starting to play with my brain. I type it in and remember that wonderful chocolate milk of long-ago. I have moments when the urge to go down to the kitchen and mix up a glass washes over me and then I remember that it's all gone. And I'm sad.

On a happier note, Skooby is starting to grow teeth. I've been waiting for this. Grandchildren exist, as far as I'm concerned, to eat the stuff I give them. He seems to know the routine: arrive at my house, get locked into the high chair, reach for the honey-butter Ritz cracker that I hold out to him, and look happy while he gums it up.

I've been waiting to feed him (and his cousin ) cookies. I've held off long enough and tomorrow I give in to the urge. These are the cookies I've been dreaming of sharing with the little guys:

Cinnamon Crackle Cookies

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism by Donald T. Critchlow. I know, I know, Phyllis gets a bad rap. And she married herself the kind of last name that Hollywood agents would change half a heartbeat. But I really admire the lady.

For those of you who are too young to remember rotary dial phones, Phyllis was a housewife from the St. Louis area who led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment. Actually, calling her "just a housewife" doesn't paint an accurate picture of the woman. Spurred by a Catholic sense of duty, she worked in Washington when she was a young single woman, which is where she learned the art of political organizing. After marriage and a first child, friends approached her husband Fred and asked him to run for Congress. He wasn't interested. "Then how about Phyllis?" they asked.

She didn't win the race, but she brought her considerable skills to bear on cause after cause. She fought against communism, for national defense, for Goldwater and Reagan. Not long before the ERA fight, she sat down to dinner with her husband and six children and announced that she'd decided to go to law school.

This is a woman who subscribed to 100 magazines and newspapers, who seldom got caught spewing mistaken facts. Her energy seemed endless, although she surely must have had household help. I just don't think she could have made all those phone calls, published all those newsletters, or run around Illinois making all those speeches without somebody back home to make dinner and clean the bathrooms. (I don't think money was a problem. Fred was a lawyer.) And when Phyllis' name became nationally known, she would hire a ballroom and throw a reception for her supporters.

Phyllis' enemies saw her as "doctrinaire, intolerant and self-righteous." Her supporters found her "logical, morally passionate [who] spoke on behalf of the average American." In later years, a very seasoned Phyllis had refined the art of maintaining her cool in a debate. When Betty Friedan said she would like to burn Phyllis at the stake, Schlafly calmly replied, "I'm glad you said that because it just shows the intemperate nature of proponents of ERA."

The book can be heavy wading. I endured the parts about nuclear stuff, but ate up everything the ERA fight. If the political stuff doesn't appeal to you but you'd like to read about the woman, I suggest Sweetheart of Silent Majorityby Carol Felsenthal. I think I read that one decades ago and enjoyed it.

Next up, Character Studies by Mark Singer. This book is a collection of profiles, all on "the curiously obsessed." People who collects Tom Mix memorabilia; a group of guys who meet every week to discuss how to find the skull of Pancho Villa (we didn't know it was missing!) and return it to Mexico. Then there is the chapter on Donald Trump, throughout which the author seems to be rolling his eyes. As Singer says, Trump, for all he has in this life, completely lacks a sense of irony. I really gotta read that chapter out loud to John.

Next up, When the Messenger is Hot a short-story collection by Elizabeth Crane. All of her stories take the tone of a gossipy friend, telling you her latest troubles over a couple tall cups of Starbucks' best. Some stories suffer from too many cow patties, some from a structure little better than a fleshed-out list. Crane's sentences run on and on. Taking her all in one chunk tried my patience some, unless it was a really charming or compelling story, i.e., "Privacy and Coffee," "Year-at-a-Glance,", "Christina" and "Something Shiny," which was about a girl who wrote her memoirs. Then Hollywood wanted to make them into a movie. Then the actress hired to play the author came to study her habits and mannerisms. Great fun.

Poor little recipes need a note pinned to their shirts

Today we feature some of the family favorites, the dishes that the kids ask for again and again, mostly when they want to make something to take to the potluck dinner. The trouble is, every time they want to cook these favorite dishes, they can't find the copy of the recipe Mom sent to them.

So let's put them up here on the blog and be done with it.

Pizza in a Bowl

MONSTER COOKIES

6 eggs
2 1/4 c. light brown sugar
2 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 tsp. light corn syrup
4 tsp. baking soda
1 c. butter (not margarine)
3 c. peanut butter
9 c. uncooked oatmeal
1 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 c. M&Ms

In a large bowl mix all ingredients in order listed. Drop dough from well rounded tablespoon (or small ice cream scoop) on ungreased cookie sheets. Flatten cookies (six cookies to a sheet). Bake at 350' for 12 minutes. Don't overbake. Allow to cool 1 minute. These freeze well. 1/36 of this batch--and that's a mighty big cookie but why else do they call it "monster"?--equals 390 calories. Try not to overdo yourself.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we feature Poor White by Sherwood Anderson. If you like a story that talks about a town and everybody in it--the strange guy out at the telegraph office, the huckster that schemes for wealth as he piggybacks onto somebody else's idea, the oldsters who can't stand change and the young folks who swirl with the ambitions of their age, you would probably like Poor White. Set in fictional Bidwell, Ohio, just as the machine age ushers in, it portrays a vigorous, hopeful time that I'm kind of sorry I missed.

The author, though, regretted the coming of the machines. His "most sensual" passages (according to reviewers) lament the passing of a bucolic age. Yes, I might like to have seen farm towns when they were full of people. These days, they're shells of their former selves.

Forty Wiped Out

I look forward to Natalie coming over tomorrow. The plan is to make and bake Christmas treats.

The problem? Food doesn't sound good right now.

Our ward had a Christmas party last Friday night. It was a Night in Bethlehem, with people dressed in biblical clothing, walking around the "market," getting sandwiches, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, olives at the different booths.

After the party, everybody was healthy just long enough to speak and sing at the Saturday night session of stake conference. Then they started going down, a regular roll-call through the ward list, reports of this family and that stuck at home, throwing up. According to the bishop's count, forty people got sick.

It hit John pretty hard. I caught an extremely light version a couple days later(I didn't eat anything but a brownie at the party) but I still don't want to do anything but languish. All the Christmas treats that I'm usually dying to eat are a big "meh" to me right now.

However, you may be feel like gorging. So I offer you The Carson Christmas Treat Plate, part 1.

SUGAR COOKIES, big batch
2 cups margarine, softened
2 cups granulated sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. lemon extract
6 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda

In a large bowl, cream butter adn sugar. Beat in eggs, vanilla and lemon extract until light and fluffy. In a large bowl, combine flour adn baking soda. Gradually stir flour mixture into egg mixture until blended.

Chill dough (or divide in four parts, form into logs, wrap in wax paper, then tin foil and freeze for up to 6 months). Roll out dough and cut into shapes. Bake on greased cookies sheets, at 350' for 8-10 minutes.

The big secrets are to keep from handling the dough too much with your hands, and to roll kinda thick. We frost our with Vanilla Butter Frosting (see the Memorial Day entry) and throw red and green sprinkles on top.

CARDAMOM COFFEE BREAD or, really good braided bread.
2 pkg. active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water (105'- 115')
1 tsp. sugar
1 12-oz. can evaporated milk
7 to 8 cups flour
1/2 to 1 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp. ground cardamom (this is a Scandinavian spice; don't skimp out on it)
4 eggs, room temperature (warm them up in a measuring cup of hottish water)
2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 slightly beaten egg
2 TB. milk

In a large mixer bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Stir in 1 tsp. sugar adn let stand for 5 minutes.
Heat milk to 105'- 115'. Add milk, half the flour, 1/2 to 1 cup sugar, cardamom, 4 eggs and salt to the yeast. Beat with electric mixer till smooth. Beat in the butter.
Stir in as much remaining flour as you can with a spoon. Cover; let rest 15 minutes. Turn out onto a floured surface. Knead in enough remaining flour to make a moderately stiff dough that's smooth and elastic.
Place in greased bowl, turn to grease surface. Cover and let rise in a warm place till doubled (1 to 1 1/2 hours). Punch down dough. Turn dough onto cutting board; divide into 3 portions. Divide each portion into 3rds. Shape each piece into a 24-inch rope.
Using 3 ropes each, shape into 3 braided loaves; tuck under ends. Place on lightly greased baking sheets. Cover and let rise till doubled (about 1 hour).
Mix egg and milk; brush over braids. Bake in 375' oven for 20 minutes or till golden. Makes 3 loaves. This freezes well.

One of my college roommates learned to make this on her mission to Finland. One night, she made it at our apartment, then went off on a date with her fiance. Um, there wasn't much left when she returned.

I never got the recipe from her, but I saw this one in a magazine years later. Comes close enough. Goes fast at our house.

As for the Finished Book Pile, we have Angry Housewives Eating Bon-Bons by Lorna Landvik. This is one of those novels that follows the characters for years. Five women form a book club in Minnesota and the reader watches the ladies go from idealistic young wives to wise, mature women. One character takes on all kinds of '60s causes, marching in protests, fighting for Social Justice in every conceivable corner. She's tiresome until she mellows out later. Cow patty count is medium low.

Then there's Saturday by Ian McEwan. This isn't McEwan's best book. He's famous for Atonement but this one will do as a fairly clean, upper-crust story. Having just been through a writing class where the professor railed against "static action," (that's the stuff the character does every day,i.e. he got up, he shaved, he ate breakfast) and urged us on to dynamic action, upsetting the order of things, making the characters more miserable with every page turn, I wonder how McEwan's manuscript would have fared in this class. Yeah, a couple big things happen in the story, but there's a lot of what he had for breakfast and how the city square outside his lovely London house always looks. Hey, I kinda like that stuff. And if you're curious about brain surgery, you get to go into the operating room with the main character and look over his shoulder as he "cooks the nerve by radioactive thermocoagulation" and a dozen or so other goodies like that.

WHERE ARE MY COOKIES?

I came home from the family reunion and found that my cat-sitter had raided my cookie stash. At least she left two for us.

They were MRS. FIELDS COOKIES, or I think so anyway. The newspaper I got them from called them "$250 Cookies." Back then, a story was going around that somebody called the Mrs. Fields Company and asked for the recipe, agreeing to pay the $2.50 they demanded. When she checked her credit card bill, she'd been charged $250. In revenge she published the recipe far and wide.

So here is the version I use:

2 cups butter, melted
2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups brown sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
4 cups flour
5 cups oatmeal
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 (24 oz.) pkg. chocolate chips
1 (7 oz.) Hershey bar, grated

Cream sugars and butter. Add eggs and vanilla. In separate bowl, mix flour, oatmeal (measure out the 5 cups oatmeal, then put small amounts in blender and blend until powdery), salt, baking powder & baking soda. Combine all mixed ingredients, add chips (the dough can hold only about 18 oz. of chips. I'm sure you'll figure out something to do with the leftovers) and Hershey bar. Make golf-ball sized cookies & place on ungreased baking sheets 2 in. apart. Bake at 375' for 9-11 minutes.

As you might guess from the quantities, this makes a big batch. Hope you have a bath-tub sized mixing bowl.

When we made our first batch years ago, I was all ready to start spooning out the dough. Then the oven caught fire. Sparks and flames burst out of the electric elements inside. The oven made zinging and zapping sounds. I yelled at Jim to call the fire department. He was about 14 at the time. "What do I tell them?" he said.

"That we're having a fire!" Then I ran down in the basement and turned off every switch in the electric box.

Cutting off the juice quelled the fire. But we were jumpy with adrenaline the rest of the night. And we had a big bowl of cookie dough and no oven to bake it in.

We talked the neighbors into letting us bake it at their house. It wasn't hard.

Oh, and for those of you that care, the entire recipe rings in at 14,600 calories total. 1/4 cup of dough is probably 313 cals.

As for the Finished Book Pile, we'll start with Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison. This woman worked for the Head Start program. She saw so many needy kids that she decided to become a foster mom. A hundred kids later, she wrote a book (when did she find the time?) that I really couldn't stay away from. I was simply in awe of how she handled crises like convincing a very dirty little victim of sexual abuse to take a bath. The social workers, the counselors, even the lawyers exhibited amazing people skills. Walking with her through the tough moments kept me gripped. For instance, whenever she gets new child, she takes them to a doctor for a thorough examination. So there she sits, in the waiting room, with a bruised and battered baby, and all the other parents giving her accusing looks.

Next up, The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. I feel like I'm making less of a report and more of a confession. Ok, ok, the book was full of cow patties, but it's just the nature of the subject. I stuck with it for the sake of opposition research. It wasn't hard to figure out the author's bias: Abstinence is crock. His heroine is forced to teach it anyway, thanks to the crazy members of the something-something Tabernacle that's taking over the town, even the whole country! A person like me, who believes we ought to give abstinence a chance, reads a book like this just to know if these Tabernacle types are portrayed fairly. Perrotta does his best to make them into real crazies. The minister, once a normal, lowly worker in an electronics store, has a mystical, almost electrical conversion when he finds a Bible he had tossed under his desk, whereupon he proceeds to destroy all the evil TVs and computers throughout the store.

Right, Perrotta.

A Barbie-doll of a woman comes to the school to plug for the Abstinence Ed. program, telling the assembled students that she's a 28-yr.-old virgin with a hot boyfriend, and showing pictures of their vacation together in the Caribbean.

Right, Perrotta. Abstinence requires a few buffer-zone rules. It's not just "no sex," it's "no just-the-two-of-you vacations with your hot boyfriend."

It's a good read, but the author's jacket picture--crossed arms, ironic smile--told me that he just doesn't get the sincerely religious person. Only one of his Tabernacle people was a fully fleshed-out human being and half the story is about whether Tim will hold up, or whether he will crumble under the dictates of his faith.

In the end, I was angry at wacky believers as well as at too-cool-for-you unbelievers.

Not that I really want to see January again

Don't want to overwhelm ya'll or anything, but I have more good stuff to share.

For instance, January is a long way off, isn't it? January is when the little Girl Scouts in your neighborhood come around and offer you cookies. January is when you can look forward to your Thin Mint fix. Of course, the seven boxes of Thin Mints you order won't show up until March. And March is a really, really long way off, isn't it? Are you sure you're gonna make it 'til then?

No? Getting a little shaky?

I hear ya. So let's tide ourselves over with Mint Sandwich Cookies.

"Store in an airtight container at room temperature," says the recipe.  Who are they kidding? Yeah, and the Girl Scouts say you can store their cookies in your freezer, but that only works if nobody in your thieving family knows where the freezer is (or how to open it).
Your best source for chocolate candy coating is the craft store. I found it near the cake decorating supplies. If any of you are experienced dippers, maybe you can give me some hints. I used toothpicks to shove the cookies around in the chocolate, then tongs to pull them out. If you've got a better way, I'll listen.

After the leftover chocolate hardened for a few days, I tried to warm it up and dip strawberries in it. Most chocolate-dipped strawberries look like Eliza Doolittle at the ball. Mine looked like Eliza on the streetcorner. But they tasted so good, John and I didn't care.

As for the Finished Book Pile, we'll cheat again and report on the half-finished View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro.

Miss Munro scoured her Scottish genealogy and spun the facts about all those uncles, aunts and grandparents into short stories. She inserts herself into the stories with phrases like "I remember . . ." or "Uncle James wrote a letter that said . . ." so they read a little more like a well-done history than a traditional exposition/complication/resolution story arc.

When she can get away from the "I remember"s, she keeps me turning the pages as the characters bob along on the ship to America, then on across the prairie. She makes them real. This one's an old fool. That one's an irritable wench. Here's your good and patient big brother. There's your conniving young son. Who stole the baby? Why did the villagers play that terrible joke on the brother and sister?

The family stories make up the first half of Munro's book. The second half is . . . um . . . 'scuse me while I go read the second half.

In the college-girl kitchen

I'm living the college-girl life this week. I'm shacked up in Emma's room, where I find a wall calendar with due dates for assignments, textbooks stacked beside her bed, and the student herself frowning over her schoolwork.

So if you get the urge to cook while visiting a college student/working girl, the food better be quick and require minimum kitchen equipment. Out of all the dinner ideas I brought to her, Emma said, "Let's definitely do this one."

CHICKEN SALSA PIZZA


CRISP GRAHAM COOKIES

YIELD: 7 doz. 2-in cookies which, if you can make them that small, will have 64 calories each. Goodness, who could possibly make them that small? We came out with 39 cookies and three (or was it four, Emma?) spoonfuls of raw dough.
If the dough seems a little sticky, throw in a couple spoonfuls of flour.


As for the Finished Book Pile, I forgot to mention Freakonomics by Steven Levitt. Finished it weeks ago. Returned it to the library rather efficiently. Forgot it while I dove into research-type reading.

Levitt, as economists go, can't keep his mind on truly boring economic stuff, but spends his days wondering about questions like Do schoolteachers cheat? and What were your parents telling the world when they gave you your name? Being an economist, he's comfortable with numbers and data, which he uses to answer these compelling little questions. Title chapters include: "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?" and "What Makes a Perfect Parent?"

I'm currently working my way through Mark Winegardner's Crooked River Burning, a novel about . . . Cleveland. Hey, out in the Midwest, they call Cleveland "the mistake on the lake," referring to the time when it had polluted its waters so badly, they caught fire.

So what has Winegardner got to say about Cleveland?

He starts his story back in the '40s when, according to the jacket, "Cleveland was America's sixth biggest city," a decent place, a hometown to be proud of. His story, complete with star-crossed lovers, advances to 1969, by which time Cleveland had lost population and prestige. Readers like me are willing to let Winegardner tell us: what happened?

Readers like me are not, however, willing to read about Cleveland Indians' baseball games. Winegardner likes to give us blow-by-blow accounts of famous games, or infamous ones, I don't know and don't care. Easily skipped.

He's a fun writer when he's not trying to be too glib. I can see him sometimes, taking a writerly break, making a sandwich and repeating to himself some phrase he just wrote, feeling awfully proud of it, juggling the mayo and the mustard playfully as he puts them back in the fridge.

Cow patty count for this book is 2 1/2 or 3 out of 10.

Thank you for returning it to the library

Hey, I finished The Kite Runner last week. I'd tell you all about, but I'll bet you've read it already. The reason I'm so late getting around to it is that I've been waiting for you to return it to the library.

Next book up was Verandah People, a collection of short stories by Jonathan Bennett. It was so-so. I put up with it because it was a mini-trip to Australia, where all these story characters sit out on their seaside verandahs, leading not very happy lives. Hey, if I could sit on a seaside verandah in Australia, I'd be happy.

If you decide to take on the book, but don't like yucky stuff, skip "The Slow War Cry of Grammar."

Now I'm slogging through The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood. The book jacket is covered with liberal praise from other authors I have read and enjoyed, but I must be missing something. Knitting is a Lifetime Channel movie tucked between bookcovers. All the drama feels trumped up, with just enough lovely jaunts to Europe thrown in. All the characters have pretty jobs, the kind soap opera characters might have. Real people spend their days making phone calls for collection agencies, or providing respite care for handicapped children. Hood's people own knitting shops, or blow glass, or run darling little bakeries where they make delicate pastries all day long. They own charming beachside cottages on the East Coast on their knitting-shop pay. Hey, do you know how much charming beachside cottages cost?

The most sympathetic, humane woman in the book falls in love with another woman. I guess it turns out badly; I'm not sure because I skipped that part. Now that I'm 3/4 of the way through, things are finally getting truly terrible for the main character, which means that the story is finally picking up.

All in all, Kite Runner was far superior--great description, spare prose, credible characters and real drama.

Since I didn't offer you anything new and compelling to read, how about a great cookie recipe:

CHOCOLATE MINT SUGAR COOKIE DROPS
Mix together:
1 cup sugar
3/4 c. vegetable oil
Beat in:
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
Mix together and add to the sugar-egg mixture:
2 1/2 c. flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
Stir in:
1 - 10 oz. pkg. mint chocolate chips
Form into balls and roll in:
1/4 cup sugar
Place on cookie sheets. Bake at 350' for 8-10 minutes. For those of you who care, the whole batch weighs in at 5784 calories.

If you can't find mint chocolate chips, just use regular ones after adding 1/4 tsp. mint extract to the dough. Or maybe 1/2 tsp., I can' t remember. Just make sure the dough smells minty.

Our Crystal Lake bishop's wife made these at Christmas time and brought them to book group. As we all traded goodies, we were encouraged to take enough home for the family. So I took plenty of these. And they just never made it home. Not sure where they went ;-)