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.

Catch and Release

A few artfully-arranged ponds dot our neighborhood. The powers that be stocked them with fish, then posted the rules.

According to the signs next to the ponds, only neighborhood residents are supposed to fish there. Now, do I know my neighbors? Could I recognize twenty faces? Ten? Barely. But when I see some guy in a t-shirt casting his line, and a truck parked nearby, I'm pretty sure he's not my neighbor. If he was, he could have walked to the pond, right?

We get a lot of these "guests." One woman grew so annoyed at the "guests" near her house that she pulled out her camera and snapped pictures of the offenders and their license plates. Myself, I figure I've got no right to police them, not when I'm a frequent trespasser in a great many other neighborhoods, parking at their pools and playgrounds and walking a few miles on their sidewalks.

Another rule at the ponds is "catch and release." I have no idea if the little fishies get tossed back into the water or not. They could be headed straight for somebody's fry pan (inedible as they are) and I would never hear their cries of panic. I'm just as oblivious to the relieved ones swimming in the depths after a brush with somebody's hook and lure.

Not all the caught-and-released are so happy with their fate, at least not in The Opposite of Love by Julie Buxbaum. Here's a story in which the heroine, a young attorney in Manhattan, senses that her man is about to buy the ring and ask the question. So she throws him back in the pond.

Then she wonders if she did the right thing. Not that her fish is terribly willing to be caught again.

I don't know how it all ends yet, but Buxbaum's story explores why a girl does such a thing. After all, her friends thought he was the perfect catch.  He was a doctor, and handsome, and looked endearing when he took Sunday afternoon naps on her couch, his hands clasped across his chest.

Do our heroine's problems have anything to do with her distracted daddy, who is busy playing senator in the state of Connecticut? With an absent mommy, who died of cancer half a life ago?

Buxbaum's writing can really sparkle. But in between the great stuff, she tosses in a lot of heroine-wakes-up-late-scrambles-to-throw-herself-together. Also, there are brief but frequent cow patties, totally unnecessary, but so much a part of Buxbaum's world that she would be genuinely puzzled to hear that some of us really don't find them very funny.

So, you are forewarned.

Our heroine, skittish as she is, doesn't seem like the type to bake a batch of MAN-CATCHER BROWNIES. We baked them here at Bye-Bye Nesquik, and we don't have any men that need catching, or releasing either. We just like stuff that is gooey and chocolatey.

30 Kraft caramels, unwrapped
2/3 cup evaporated milk
1 15.25-oz. package German chocolate cake mix
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Heat oven to 350' and line the bottom of a 9x13-in baking pan with parchment paper. Melt caramels with 1/3 cup of the evaporated milk in a small saucepan, stirring mixture occasionally; set sauce aside.

Stir together cake mix, melted butter and remaining 1/3 cup evaporated milk to form a dough. Press 1 1/3 cups of the dough into the pan in an even layer. Bake until puffed but not cooked through, about 7 min. Remove from oven and pour caramel sauce evenly over the top. Sprinkle chocolate chips over caramel in an even layer.

Top with remaining dough, crumbled into bits and scattered. Return to oven. Bake until brownies are puffy and set, 10 to 11 mins. more. Cool completely and cut into squares.  Makes 16 brownies, 285 calories each.

This recipe appeared in the now-defunct Ladies Home Journal.

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. 

Half Marathons for the Untrained

I must have needed the nap.

We are not morning church people this year.  We get the pleasures of sleeping in versus the pleasures of the Sunday afternoon nap.  When we arrive home, all we want to do is eat.  Bye-Bye Nesquik, if she wishes to be loved by all, had best start frying up the sausages and hunting down the measuring spoons.

But today, Bye-Bye Nesquik sat on her bed, sinking further and further down until she gave in completely.  

Little wonder.

I'm used to walking, a lot.  I can do ten miles at a stretch and still be cheerful (probably because I promise myself a Butterfinger Blizzard when I'm done).  But Friday, I decided to go for twelve miles.

Packing along extra snacks and cold water, I set out.  There was the shady park, where bikers and runners blasted past me.  There was the remote path where, on my right, I could peek through the fence at the cars speeding by on the freeway and, on the left, I saw a backlot full of old bus shelters.  There was a little restaurant row in a neighborhood that is fighting its way back from neglect.  (It's 75% there.  Keep trying.)  Then there was the nice part of town where the day spas and the art galleries lead the way into hushed neighborhoods with beautiful landscaping.

All the way along the route, I worried that I couldn't finish.  One shoe hurt. Not to mention that I was all too aware that if I turned right at the private high school campus instead of turning left, I could cheat my way back to my car sooner.

But  I didn't cheat.  And I'm glad, because it would have been sad to miss the really nice street with the tree-lined promenade down the middle.

But it was work all the way.  Twelve miles, as my daughter tells me, is just short of a half marathon.  I'm not doin' it again unless I get a picnic and a nap somewhere in the middle.  

So who's surprised that I conked out today?

However, everybody got fed.  Kinda late, but it happened.

Our Fast Sunday tradition around here is to try all new recipes:

CHICAGO-STYLE PIZZA

FROZEN BUTTERFINGER PIE

Over on the Book Pile, we're attempting Toni Morrison's A Mercy.  Ms. Morrison deserves to sit at the right hand of the masterful William Faulkner.

Trouble is, I can't abide Faulkner.

Ms. Morrison's story jerks forward and backward.  I would like to like this book, but with all its artful ambiguity, I cannot keep everybody straight.  Now, who's on the farm?  Who is the mistress of all this?  Who's pregnant?  Who lost a baby? 

Does she think readers lock themselves away in a lonely cabin, wholly absorbed, stopping only to brew a cup of tea or stand on the deck and gaze out over the valley?  I myself squeeze in a few pages after adding up last month's receipts, and a few more sitting in the food court at the mall, and a few more while waiting for my grandson to punch and kick his way through karate class.  Every reading session feels like I'm opening an entirely new book.  It doesn't help that the horse is named Regina and the people are named Sorrow and Patrician, unless I am missing some five-star symbolism here.

I read on, pretty much lost.  I shouldn't have to work this hard.

Although if Ms. Morrison can find me a lonely cabin with a scenic back deck, I will really buckle down on this thing.  

I Can't Believe I Didn't Try Before

Curses!  Foiled again!

I'm dabbling in the art of reproducing something great I ate at a restaurant.  Been at it for months.  Been back to the Chicago restaurant so many times, they're starting to remember the odd-duck lady who dissects the food on her plate like just so much pinned frog.

There's a reason I like cookbooks and recipe sites.  Somebody else has tweaked the sauce, eaten the almost-rights and borne the suspense.  So why did I cast off into the uncharted seas of cookery?

Well, the memory of this menu item sticks to me like cat hair, which we all know never lets go.  Some people hear a band and they MUST snag concert tickets.  Some see a pair of spike heels and they MUST own them.

I just MUST.

I thought I would have results to share with you tonight, but I'm still not satisfied.  My motto seems to be "Wait!  Let me try it one more time."  My family rolls their eyes so much, they risk permanently staring at their pre-frontal cortices.

At least they eat all the versions I feed them.  "Mom, it's fine.  This is really good."

"No, it's not quite . . .  not quite right yet."

Therefore, what you get tonight is:

CHOCOLATE-COVERED STRAWBERRIES

So easy, I can't believe I didn't attempt this before. 

(Actually I did, in a half-hearted way )

The recipe instructs us to "Insert toothpicks in strawberry leaves.  Holding by the toothpick, dip the strawberries into the chocolate mixture. Turn the strawberries upside down and insert the toothpick into styrofoam for the chocolate to cool."  I just held them by their leaves and let them cool on a wax-paper-lined cookie sheet.  I chilled them for 20-30 minutes.  Then they lifted off the wax paper easily.   Thirty-eight calories per medium berry, probably more for large ones.  And no fancy white drizzles in my kitchen.  I have never mastered drizzling.

Still reading Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels.  After finishing Some Hope, I caught up to where I originally started in Mother's Milk.  

You may recall young Robert, son of Patrick, who describes his birth.   Father Patrick has taken his young family to dwell at his mother's estate in the south of France, which Patrick will not inherit because Mummy has dedicated the house to the Transpersonal Foundation, offering it as a haven where people might "connect."  No one knows what they are connecting with. 

The charm of Mother's Milk  is in seeing everything from little Robert's height.  Puzzled by adult conversations, he escapes to stare into the fish pond.  Then one of the people trying to "connect" happens along and tries to convince him to listen to the fish which "bring us messages from the depths." 

Good luck, little Robert, figuring out these adults. 

And At Do-Re-Mi, We Find . . .

So, I went back to Do-Re-Mi, so to speak, in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels and found quite a cow-patty-laden beginning.

In the first of this quadrilogy, Never Mind, poor five-year-old Patrick lives under the rule of a father that charms people only to humiliate them later.  Lured in from playtime by his father's piano playing--a tune the Daddy composed especially for Patrick--he stands before the man, ready to please.  "Shall I pick you up by your ears?" the father gently teases.  With the boy sufficiently softened up, the father makes good on his tease/threat and Patrick hangs in the air, convinced that "his ears were going to be torn off, like the gold foil from a pot of cream."  Dad ignores the boy's whimpers, then caps off the experience with fatherly advice:  "Always think for yourself.  Never let other people make important decisions for you." 

And it gets much worse. 

Much of the first novel is a house party, populated by this daddy-of-bad-surprises and his thoroughly demoralized wife.  Guests include a serially-married piece of British gentry who brings along his hippie girlfriend of the moment; plus a philosopher, who also brings his date, an American journalist, a woman with enough detachment to see through Bad Daddy, at least a little. 

The British gentlemen misses women who can give him intelligent conversation, but at a flash of the hippie girlfriend's legs, he forgets all about intelligence.

And they all meet to drink wine and gossip wickedly.  The weed-fortified hippie girl, too dazzled by the glorious south-of-France estate on which they spend a weekend, doesn't quite catch on to how much fun this isn't. 

Why would I read about such cruel, self-absorbed people?   Well, their world is untouched by the fears and frustrations of mine, so I go there for a visit.

The cow patties are truly distasteful.  I'm not recommending, just reporting.

By now, I have moved on to the second installment, Bad News.  Patrick is now twenty-two.  His father has just died.  Patrick flies from London to New York to identify the body.  Naturally, he doesn't mourn.  No, it's more like a celebration, bingeing on heroin.  Then again, this is a pretty sorry way to celebrate, as Patrick spins out of control.  Shall I call my New York dealer?  No, I definitely won't call him.  I'll leave this restaurant and go straight back to the hotel.  Tell you what.  I'll just ring him up and if he doesn't answer, then Fate has spoken.  No dealer tonight.  D---!  Why doesn't he answer. Well, maybe I'll just swing by and pay him a social call.

I recall a story in People Magazine wherein a rock star admitted that, at first, drugs were fun.  Then, they were fun with problems.  In the end, it was just the problems.

We know that Patrick will become the father of little Robert, whom we mentioned last week.  So we await better days for this boy who grew up with such a bad excuse for a father.

After a dip into this world, I return to my own, where I cook my Fast Sunday meal:

Broiled Pizza Burgers

Vegetable Trio

Black Forest Parfaits

What Do We Do With This Doorstop?

Interlibrary loan is a tricky thing.  They fetch the book for you, in this case from the local Quaker college.  They hand it over to you, for free, but with a warning that "This title cannot be renewed."

I may have gotten too used to my library's 8-renewals policy to be able to live with that steel-toed phrase, "may not be renewed."  And the book itself is a doorstop-sized burden, not something you would want to drag along for your wait at the doctor's office.  Nor is it something you can finish in three weeks if you were struggling along with another book and got started late on this one. 

Nor am I likely to finish it when, as I turn its pages, my mind wanders to more interesting things like, say, eating unsalted crackers.

It's a biography.  The subject created a ripple in her day.  She traveled in the same circles as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau and Horace Greeley.  The author who wrote about her won awards for bringing to life the subject's "dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the major movements of her time."   

I hate to miss out on the story of someone who might have been important.  Next time I found myself trapped in a dinner party with academics, I might have been able to run in their fast company.  I believe, though, that the Quaker library is going to get their book back with hardly any finger smudges of mine in its margins.  Come to think of it, the book's spine feels rather firm, as if it hasn't been opened much.

So if I have to account to you for how I spent my time while in possession of this book, I will tell you that I made:

Chocolate Mint Torte

I Need a Few Shortcuts

You can play all day Saturday.  Or you can work on a multi-course Easter dinner.  You can't do both.

Or maybe you can.

I played all day, visiting an aquarium full of tropical fishes, alligators, sharks and tourists (my favorite animal, by the way).  Then I visited a grocery store stocked with more varieties of beer, cheese, soda pop, international cookies, jelly beans, breakfast cereal, cake truffles, pet kibble and even insects than you ever thought possible, . . .

 . . . Then came home and tried to create dinner.

Anything's do-able, with a few shortcuts, like: 

Quicker Lemon Angle Food Supreme

In spite of how much Kate Atkinson's Case Histories annoyed me, I finished it.  Too  many characters trooped through the pages, leaving cow patties along the way.  

Why I would embark on yet another of Atkinson's books I can't explain.  But here I am, up to page 37 of When Will There Be Good News?    I'm already enjoying her wry young British nanny, Reggie.  Reggie comes from the wrong side of the tracks.   Her mother has been through many men.  Her brother slips away from family occasions to steal computers and phones.  Reggie is admitted to a "horrible posh school" on scholarship, on account of her father dying in the service of his country.  Naturally, she doesn't fit in well.  When she escapes, she becomes a nanny to a doctor mom.

Reggie is smart, observant and rather likeable.

By page 37 of the last book, I had met characters that should win the Nobel prize for World's Unhappiest Family.   Things already look much better in the new book.  But we'll see, will we not?   

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 Want This Man's Job

I have surely missed my calling.  I want to be Hank Steuver and write books like his Off Ramp.

When he hires on at the evening newspaper in Albuquerque, all the exalted beats are  already taken--the crime beat, the schools beat, the "drunk Indians" beat.  So they give him the leftovers.  He's free to write whatever strikes his fancy.

He wanders into the odd corners of life and writes stories on storage units, or adult night at the skating rink.  Or the fate of bowling. Did you know that professional bowling tried, at one time, to be taken seriously as a sport?  When you think of bowlers, what sort of body comes to mind?  Not exactly athletic-looking, is it?  

Or how about the chapter on funerals?  Steuver rides along with the Austin, Texas, fellow who set up a funeral home in a strip mall.  His rock-bottom prices drive the competitors batty. The nerve!  Caskets made in Mexico?  With door hinges!  Where's the respect for the dead?  

Where's the respect indeed?  As Steuver tells it, there are "enough dead people every year in Texas to support 570 funeral homes."  Yet, 1300 manage to stay in business.  How do they do it?  Rampant gouging, no doubt.  (But this is a particular soap box of mine, from which I will now step down.)   

What Steuver finds is that we are basically stuck with ourselves.  But we forget about it by reading about other people's stuckness.  Or by tracking them down, reporter's notebook in hand, camera slung over the shoulder, and writing down their stories.  So, how many gifts do you expect at your wedding?  What makes you shop at Target instead of K-Mart?  What's behind the door of that storage unit?  Christmas decorations?  Broken vacuums?  And, "Who knew that a sixty-five-year-old man could figure skate (on roller skates) and look like a beer-gutted swan on a lake of neon?" 

Yes, I think I could love covering the off-beat like Steuver's.   It has to be better than the crime beat, the schools beat, even the drunk Indians beat. 

Finally, all those grown-up skaters go to Trudy's afterwards for margaritas.  If I could trust myself to stay upright on a pair of skates, I would use up my roller-drome calories by treating myself to:

Peanut Butter Cashew Sundaes 

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

The Dark Side of the World

I have read the lawyer thriller and come out unscathed. So I recommend to you Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, with a few caveats.

It is one of those books where the emotion doesn't kick in until halfway through, when lawyer Rusty, charged with murder, begins to ponder the horrors of prison life.  Of course, once the courtroom drama commences, we have no shortage of emotion.  We get elation and despondency as each side wins and loses battles on their way to the final verdict.

My caveats are:

The sexy scenes.  We discussed Carolyn and male fantasy last week.  Rusty went nuts over her, but I yawned.

The darkness.  Rusty's father survived World War II, not as chipper American soldier who handed out chocolate bars, but as a desperate Croatian or some such, fleeing gunfire.  Survival required desperate measures, so desperate that, after he settled in the United States, he lived as though life would always be as tough and unpleasant as what he had left behind.  Lawyer Rusty inherits that pessimism.  To him, life breaks people, end of story.

Next week's book is all doom and gloom too.  I think this calls for a recipe of unremitting darkness, as in dark chocolate.  Perhaps you should not attempt Turow's book without a plate of Caramel Fudge Cheesecake nearby.

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. 

Out Night-Owling My Night Owl Self

I woke up on Saturday with a powerful case of short-on-sleep eye bags, not to mention styling a total bedhead.  That's what happens when you're up until 3 a.m., finishing David Wroblewski's Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  

Even if he wrote a few chapters with his perfumed-prose pen, the story gripped me. 

Although it occurs to me, in the light of day, that we never learn why the bad guy was bad.  What did he want that made him do -- well, I can't tell you what he did.  That would be giving it away.

And another thing:  why did Edgar -- oh, I can't tell you that either.  But what Edgar did was as puzzling as me mixing up a stiff glass of chocolate milk, then dumping it down the kitchen sink.  Plots have to make a little more sense than that.

Readers on Amazon mentioned the story's parallels to Hamlet.  Thanks to my sub-standard education, I never picked up on this.  Will I actually have to read Hamlet now?  Am I supposed to plug the bad-guy motivation from there into Wroblewski's story and call it good?

Still, I congratulate the author.  He kept me up until 3 a.m., didn't he?   He made this night-owl out-night-owl herself.  And this was a first novel, by the way.


But I think he owes us something on what drives the bad guy.

Now, having slept off my Edgar Sawtelle reading binge, I'm back to thinking about practical things, like what to fix for Sunday dessert: 

Easy Apple Crisp

You're on your own for the ice cream.

Next book:  a Christmas story.

The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With . . .

I need your pity and your patience.

Actually, no, I don't need the pity.  But the patience, yes.  I have embarked on the Russian novelists, namely Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  It's going to be weeks before I can say, "I've finished this great book and I actually know what I'm talking about when I bandy the name Tolstoy about."  But, just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, a book of 800 pages begins with 1 page.

And what a page it was.  A household in disarray, a guilty conscience.  I thought the great Russian novels were supposed to be boring and difficult.  But, except for the character names, which are a mouthful, I'm enjoying the ride--all the ice-skating, the oyster-eating, the blushing and the insulting going on with the Oblonskys and the Shcherbatskys and the rest of the gang.  

Since I won't have anything to talk about in the near future besides Karenina, are you interested in books I have read in the past?  I've done a few posts like that recently and my vague impression is that reader interest plummets when I do it. 

So speak up.  Cast your vote.

Meanwhile, we all have to eat, so I'll keep the recipes coming.  

We needed a quick dessert today.

My dessert story starts on Thursday, when I went to the music store.  Very dangerous place for a woman like me.  I told myself I was only going to ask about one book.  Once that was done, my next lie-to-myself was I'm just going to look through these bins and see if anything interesting catches my eye.  Before I knew it, a spirit of greed gripped my soul and I was surrounded by a half-dozen books, wanting all of them.   I didn't lose all my self-control, but then, anybody can say that when they want the whole cake but only eat three fat pieces.

Anyway, I own some new music books.

And I couldn't play through them because I had to leave town the next day.    They kept playing through my head while I was gone.  Not that I wasn't having a good time.  But while walking through some tres chic neighborhoods and eating at a cute breakfast place with my husband and changing clothes in the temple, I couldn't quit thinking about the Bach and the "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" and the Christmas tunes and the . . . .   Ay-yi!   The noise in my head!

Back at home, I lusted for them all the more.  Every time I walked by, I would take a peek, maybe pet the pages lovingly.  But we needed groceries.  And the laundry?  Situation Critical there. 

Finally, around nine o'clock I was free.  I took one book to the church to play through it on the organ.  I stayed until nearly midnight.

It's nothing unusual for me to skid through church short on sleep.  Usually, I stay up too late Saturday nights making Sunday desserts.  But today, I was short on sleep and dessertless to boot.

So,  Crispy Pretzel Bars to the rescue!

See?  Quick dish.  Shouldn't steal too much time from your Sunday nap.

Your Relatives are Crazier than Mine

Let's talk relatives.

Mine are pioneer stock.  Life's hardships--Relief Society callings, cow milkings and keeping journals that will inspire posterity to good works--have turned them into an even-keeled, responsible, self-effacing lot.  There is hope, however; our rising generation includes a couple jailbirds.

You might think I have nothing to regret, surrounded by people so nice and normal that we can clear out and sell the family house without a single dramatic outburst.  But I once read Florence King's Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, laughed myself silly and, upon closing the book, regretted that we had no crazies in the family line.  Why couldn't Mother throw a fit about a ruined hat once in a while? 

Miss King had her aunt Evelyn, who once believed that her womb had fallen out.  Southern women, King explained, nurse a preoccupation with their wombs, part of their frail-and-delicate act.  Southerners, she further explained, are pre-Copernican.  Copernicus, you will recall, is the guy that told us the sun does not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun.  So Southerners, as pre-Copernicans, do their best to make the world revolve around them.  Thus, all their vapors and their Aunt Evelyns.

You can skip the chapter on their sex lives, if that isn't your tall glass of ice tea, and there will still be plenty of Southern craziness to keep you entertained.

As for Southern food, in all my years of subscribing to Taste of Home, I noticed that all the recipes submitted by readers from Tennessee, Georgia and the like contained Cool Whip or pudding, or cooked in the "icebox" or on the grill.  Must be too hot to turn on an oven down there. 

Here's a dessert that shouldn't make you wilt in the kitchen:

Layered Banana Pineapple Dessert

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.  

We Didn't Know It Was a Contest

Must rave to you about today's dessert:

Chocolate Cream Dessert

I've made this kind of thing before.  I made it in different flavors--chocolate, lemon, strawberry/vanilla, even butterscotch. With some kind of crust, a cream cheese layer, a pudding layer and a Cool Whip layer, they're all the pretty much the same idea.

But this one wins the prize.  Actually, none of these desserts knew they were in a contest against each other.   But too bad, this one still gets the crown and the bouquet. 

I think it's the crust that puts it over the top.  It hit my chocolate receptors so hard that I didn't need any chocolate again for at least another hour.   

Meanwhile, I'm making progress on Claire Messud's When the World Was Steady.  We've reviewed Messud here before.  She can be a little hit or miss.  This one looks good so far.  

Two British sisters hit middle age, hard.  One attempts to salve the wounds of her divorce by climbing a difficult mountain in Bali, and she's no athlete.  The other, a spinster, worries that the young smarty-pants in her office is edging her out of a job.   

At least, that's the action so far.  I'll let you know how it goes. 

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?