On a Bridge to the Past

Suppose I had not bought this house.

After all, I tried pretty hard to buy one in the town down the road. We lived there once upon a time, and I still swim in a warm bath of memories every time I slip down there. I remember how I felt sitting at this stoplight. I remember sunlight at this exact angle as I drove down Main Street before. 

We could really have done up this warm-bath-in-memories thing royally because, while we hunted for houses, what should show up in the MLS but a home we lived in before. The interior was painted all cute and somebody finally installed a dishwasher in the kitchen. Yes, it was smaller than what we’d been living in, but we were on a mission to downsize.

We didn’t take the bait.

We did, however, bid on a house two blocks away, loving its gleaming hardwood floors and granite counters. But even that proved more than I could take.

I was a different person when I last lived on those streets. I’ve figured out a few things since then and if I woke up and looked out on the same trees, I would have felt like somebody moved my Candy Land marker all the way back to Start.

In Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, 57-year-old Jack Griffin grapples with his own past as he drives over the bridge to Cape Cod, on his way to a wedding.

He rode over that bridge in the back of his parents’ car every summer.

Mom and Dad attended Ivy League schools, assuming all the while that they would teach there. And if not the Ivy League, then a smaller East Coast college would do.

But they ended up in Indiana.

Snobby and lacking any talent for happiness, Mom and Dad got their East Coast fix vacationing on the Cape. Living all year for this hiatus from life’s cruel joke, they spent their week snatching up real estate magazines and snubbing anybody who tried to befriend them.

Can’t we just imagine the parental voices that play in Jack’s head? Not to mention the words that slip out of his mouth. Yes, Jack admits he inherited the worst parts of each parent.

Jack also honeymooned on the Cape. Oh, the plans he and Joy made as they holed up at their beach-side cottage in Truro thirty years ago

Today, though, they’re a little like a bookshelf. When you first set it up, the books sit up straight. They’re organized—biographies here, novels over there. How-to books up high, children’s books down low.

After awhile, Abe Lincoln gets shoved in beside Dr. Suess. They both slouch. They wear a coat of dust. Somebody needs to tidy this place up, but nobody wants to.

Yeah, that’s where Jack and Joy’s marriage is these days.

So Cape definitely launches on a gloomy note.

But it’s not all hopeless, I promise.

And Joy’s twin baby brothers definitely liven things up. These two Marine-Corps oafs ache for somebody, anybody, to insult them, because there’s nothing they love better than to throw a punch.

Language cow patties. 

 If you need something to pull you through Jack’s midlife taking-stock, you might whip up some Simple Sweet and Spicy Chicken Wraps. With a little bit of honey hiding in both the spread and the chicken, this dish earned a lot of love from me.

Who Ruined Halloween?

I have awesome weather powers.

Some days I get a longing for a one of my favorite creamy soups. Nah, the weather's too warm, I think. But I defiantly write it on the menu for, say, Tuesday, and by Tuesday, a cold rain blows through town and everybody is glad to sit down to soup.

A little soup weather on Halloween this year would have been welcome. What we got instead was pure nastiness. We got the kind of wind that crawls down your neck and makes you sorry you have to walk across the Kroger parking lot. We got little trick-or-treaters, their arms shaking as they stood on the doorstep, holding out their open pillow cases. We got their little faces pinched up with misery. We got a battle with the storm door, the wind shoving it against us while we serviced the brave and determined hordes that wanted their candy. 

I might be to blame for this unwelcome blast of January-in-October. Perhaps I brought it on by reading Alice Munro's short story collection, Too Much Happiness.  She sets her tales in her native Canada. So while I innocently read about somebody named Joyce driving home from work through falling snow and lashing rain, or somebody named Roy getting stuck in the woods while the snow covers his tracks, storm clouds gathered over Bye-Bye Nesquik's neighborhood and spoiled the evening of a few hundred Power Rangers, Ellas and zombies.

I apologize.

But Munro is the Meryl Streep of short-story writing. Nearly everything she creates possesses a truffle-like perfection. She makes it look easy when it most certainly is not.

Her characters ride a bus to visit somebody in prison, or share a dorm room with someone of mysterious means, or hide from the outcast that wants to be their friend. They are quiet, often bookish people, who watch bolder types get away with things.

However in one story--I won't give away which--one of these quiet ones strikes back.

It reminds me of the instructions I once read in a tourist guide: cities have muggers, it said. The smart thing to do is carry a mugger wallet. Your real wallet holds your wad of cash, your complete deck of credit cards. The mugger wallet contains ten dollar bill, and maybe one of those fake paper cards, just as a nice touch.

The mugger approaches. You take out your mugger wallet, throw it hard and far, then run fast in the opposite direction. I have no idea if this works, but it was comforting to pack it along, even if it could cost me ten bucks.

Anyway, Munro's character, the one I won't give away, sticks up for him/herself with a mugger-wallet mentality.

Book contains one lengthy cow patty.

I'll be done with Munro's collection tomorrow and then maybe this unseasonable weather will ease up.

As a failsafe, I added Taco Crescent Bake to the menu, a yummy supper dish that goes great with a crisp fall evening, do you hear me, o weather gods?  No need to deliver us a stinging, howling, Arctic whiteout.

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.

Coming Soon!

Dear Bye-Bye Nesquik readers,

We pause our regular programming just long enough for me to seize the spotlight for a minute. And we have some business to conduct.

Item 1: I wrote a book. Never mind how long it took me, but here we are today, just about ready to foist this thing on the public.  Here's how it will look on Amazon when it comes out on November 7th:

"Welcome to the world of the Runyons and the Feldsteds, two Mormon families in 1970s Maryland. Far from their Western American roots, they cling to each other like exiles clutching a precious box of topsoil from the old country.

"In The Boxford Stories you will meet Ada Runyon who always turns to Ruthalin Feldsted when she needs an ear—sharing her deepest confidences, her everyday musings, and her bits of horrified gossip. Yet Ada dies inside whenever Ruthalin’s country-cousin manners poke out in public.

"Latham Runyon, a history professor, and Erval Feldsted, a hospital engineer, bond every Sunday night over gooey desserts and vigorous religious discussion, a game their children call Stump the Rabbi. Underneath their balding heads and graying temples, each man desperately seeks a sign that God would choose him as a buddy.

"The Feldsted and Runyon children, running breathlessly through each other’s houses and backyards, have long considered each other substitute cousins. However, Ginni Runyon plots to change herself from the girl next door to the girl Marc Feldsted can’t live without.

"And when Boxford’s Mormons mix with the rest of the town, everybody could use a field guide to the other species.

"Laugh, cry, and shake your head with the Runyons and Feldsteds as they make their way through the decade that brought us leisure suits and urban decay."

Item 2:  I'm offering you a little freebie.  Starting October 27th, Bye-Bye Nesquik will post daily installments of "'Atta Boy," one of the stories in this book. Get your reading fix, Monday through Friday that week.

Item 3: Sometime in November, Bye-Bye Nesquik moves to the official author website, www.kristencarsonauthor.com.  I will let you know when we make the jump, but if you still land here after the move, we will find a way to get you there.

I may make other changes, new name maybe, but I still plan to talk about books and recipes.

Meanwhile, dine on this yummy APRICOT SALSA CHICKEN:

Good-Bye Plan A

I listened to a lot of southern accent this week.  So I had no trouble hearing John Grisham's Ford County characters in my head.

Ford County is a short story collection, heavy on lawyers because, as I think we all know, Grisham was one before he made it big in book world.

His tales, set in Clanton, Mississippi, introduce us to a disgruntled plaintiff, to an unambitious lawyer who wants to chuck it all, and more.  In a story that still leaves me smiling, the biggest hustler in the county matches wits with the blandest man in town. And then there's the cigarette-puffing family that piles into a van to visit little brother in jail.  Little brother has been busy behind bars, working on his literary career, his music career and his exoneration.

Just think how much poorer the world would be if John Grisham's Plan A (Be a baseball player!) had worked out.

Speaking of foiled Plan A's, the woman who submitted the following recipe to Taste of Home said she aimed to make a chicken caesar salad but looked in the freezer and found herself short on chicken. So she got creative and threw together:

 CHICKEN NUGGET CAESAR SALAD

I improvised on it myself, since I was missing a few supplies today.  I baked 4 Tyson's chicken patties, divided a Caesar salad kit between my husband and myself and served the cut up patties on top.  That takes the calorie count up to 605.

Added King's Hawaiian rolls. And we were happy.

Almost Ravinia

Perhaps you've heard of Ravinia, the summer music venue in Chicago's North Shore suburbs.

It consists of four important elements.

1)  Music.  An orchestra plays.  What do they play?  It doesn't matter, especially if you sit in the cheap seats, i.e. the lawn.  To experience it more as background music and less like college-class appreciative listening is OK with me.

2)  The beauty of nature.  That would be the lawn, as I just mentioned, with its surrounding forest.  You could a film a movie of lords and ladies, bows, arrows and chain mail on Ravinia's grounds and probably get away with it.

3) People-watching.  Ok, no bows, arrows or chain mail showed up during my one time there.  But I'm quite sure the people parading past me and my folding chair were the lords of finance and the ladies of sorority life, people that were as accustomed to beauty and culture as I am accustomed to the aisles of Wal-Mart.  Yes, I was a tad bit out of my element.  But I paid the ticket price (the cheap lawn tickets), therefore I belonged.

4) Food.  We did the box dinner.  The sandwich was on thick artisan bread.  The brownie was solid as a brick, yet still chewable.  Stuffed with chocolate chips.  My, oh my, oh, my, what a brownie it was!  It was the kind of brownie that, when I finished, I looked over at my husband and hoped he couldn't finish his.  Too much for you?  Need any help with that?  

Sadly, my summer has not included any Ravinia.

So I did the next best thing, Indy's own Symphony on the Prairie.  This time, I packed the dinner.  I could hardly wait to get settled on the lawn and bite into Rice Krispie treats, watermelon and:

TURKEY SANDWICH WITH CRANBERRY SAUCE

The only spoiler to this sandwich experience was the October-like chill out there on the prairie.  I shivered through the music.  Lots of other music-lovers had the smarts to wear long pants and closed shoes.  I seem to have a problem imagining warm days turning into cool nights.  

Another small problem with this delicious sandwich:  I opened a can of cranberry sauce, used a little bit and wonder what to do with the rest of the stuff.   So I tried:

CRANBERRY SAUCE CHICKEN

Over on the Book Pile, I'm still working through Julia Glass' Three Junes.  I mentioned the Brits on vacation?  Actually, the story focuses on Paul--newspaper publisher, Scottish, widowed.  Switching  between his sight-seeing in Greece and flashbacks of his marriage, we learn that his wife seemed awfully devoted to her collie-breeding business.  Or maybe she was devoted to something or someone else?

Moving on the second June, Paul has now died.  His three sons gather for the memorial service.   We get the story from the oldest son, a gay man who chose America over family closeness.  Again, the story alternates between flashbacks of his life back in New York, where all his friends grow more emaciated with AIDS, and the "now," as the bereaved gather to remember Dad and wonder about Mom.  Then one member of the family asks somebody for a big favor.  And I mean, a BIG favor. 

I haven't gotten to the third June yet.

It's a pleasant but slow-moving story.   It's got some big cow patties, but I could see 'em coming and I flipped the page.  

On Lab Rats

Our lesson this week is:  give the author a chance.

When I opened M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing and read the first pages, I wasn't planning to stick with this story of a strangely grown-up-sounding boy surrounded by scholars.  They drill him in Greek and Latin and violin lessons.  They weigh everything he consumes, then weigh again when he excretes.  They exact capricious punishments when he answers a question wrong. 

But young Octavian grew on me.  He and his mother were captured in Africa.  She was royalty.  He has no memory of the old continent.  And now they are essentially lab rats at the Novanglian College of Lucidity.  Well, privileged lab rats.  When the college throws a soiree, the mother acts the hostess.  She's royalty, after all, a shimmering beauty with whom every man would like to converse.   

When the benefactor of the institute dies, a rich young lord from England arrives to examine the premises with a mind to sponsoring these scholars.  He strikes up a flirtation with Octavian's mother and makes her an offer--with a boatload of catches. 

This is Boston, just before the American Revolution.  The colonists' rumble with discontent.  Oh, and fear, too.  They suspect the British may foment a slaves' uprising, whence masters' throats will be slit as they sleep soundly in their beds.

So, no more Greek and Latin for Octavian.  He might get too smart.

Then there is the Pox Party.  Whether for the cause of pure science, or to keep war and soldiers at arms' length, the scientists sequester themselves with a few friends (and their slaves), infect them with a "mild" strain of smallpox, promising to nurse them through it with every modern remedy at their disposal.  This, we are told, is far preferable to getting one's smallpox epidemic-style. They can all play whist and stage evening music salons while they break out in pustules together.

I won't give away any more.

Anyway, for a book that held all the promise of a financial statement, the story sure picked up.


Neither did it hurt to read it while I sat on a fine bench in the town square of one of those charming suburbs that I love so much.  The "village" was having sidewalk sales that day and the streets were full of slim ladies in their yoga pants, shopping bags swinging from their arms as they tried on shirts, or strode past the granite walls of the bank building.  Children played in decorative tufts of prairie grass.  Stroller wheels clattered on the sidewalk bricks.  A couple commuter trains clanged by.  And cicadas sang.

Every town should be like this.  We especially need a version where we don't all have to spend a million or so to buy a house there.

Now that I'm back to ordinary life, operating the ByeByeNesquik College of Recipe Experimentation, it's looks like the lab rats are in for a week of sandwiches.  The fanciest one is BROCCOLI HAM RING.

Big Bucks Homework

At my age, I should be beyond dreaming that I'll be a ballerina or an astronaut when I grow up.  But Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict has got me imagining that I can be a dandy defense lawyer someday.

That may be a weakness in his story.

His protagonist, Mickey Haller, stepped away from his law practice for awhile.  Something about getting hooked on pills.  Then a colleague turns up murdered and Mickey ends up with the man's entire practice.  First item on the to-do list: defend a movie producer accused of a double murder.

Isn't a lawyer novel supposed to have a lot of leaning against the dark wood of the witness stand and popping surprise witnesses on the prosecutor?  In this story, I'm getting more about Mickey writing stuff on his legal pad, or telling his staff where to meet him for a working lunch. 

It also didn't help that, just before I got serious about digging into the book, I watched a movie about a man taking a dreadfully dangerous business trip.  A movie like that uses up all one's adrenaline.  However, in this case, I saved some for reading Connelly's novel.

But it's all rather procedural, a lot of carrying around files instead of running from guys with knives and bombs.

So, even though Mickey Haller's problems don't have me worried like a weak bladder in a spook alley, at least I'm dabbling in my lawyer fantasies.  Yes, I too could stay late at the office, drawing a time-and-action flowchart of the night of the murders, studying crime scene photographs with a magnifying glass.  This is just homework with big bucks attached to it.  I'm sure I could get up to speed on this.  Although I think I'd stumble big time trying to guess the prosecutor's strategy.

Now, if I stayed late at the office all the time, making those big bucks, I wouldn't have time to make big dinners, would I?  But I might be able to throw together:

GRILLED CHEESE SALAD

I first tasted this at a restaurant called Tom + Chee, where they get creative with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup (Ooh, another career idea!).   You can order up the basic sandwich, or you can go fancy and add some hummus, or even some macaroni and cheese. 

It's in-a-hurry simple:  Make a salad on your plate.  Besides greens and tomatoes, I think theirs included carrot chips, sliced mushrooms, maybe a few strips of bell pepper.  I'm pretty sure they threw some cucumber in there, too.

Next, make a grilled cheese sandwich.  Cut it up into about sixteen pieces, place it on top of the salad and you will never again feel the same about ordinary croutons.  

Pour on your favorite dressing.  I think French dressing is ideal.  It fits the tomato-soup theme and it looks pretty.

How handy it is, eating my grilled cheese sandwich with a fork.  Keeps me from staining my lawyer files   Kindle with buttery fingers. 

Gettin' All Beachy

Pretend with me now:

You have set aside the laundry and the kitchen and messy garage.  You have left behind the big-box stores and the roundabouts and the doctor appointments.  You have traded it all for a tastefully decorated house, the best part of which is that you didn't have to decide where to put the little pots of decorative beach grass, or the artfully-placed conch shells, or the wall hangings that proclaim "At the Shore."

Hopefully, this house is on a shady street in a sleepy town.  Hopefully, it has a settin' porch and no hurricanes to bother you while you sit out there.

What will you do with yourself?   I don't know.  Can you lift a heavy book?  Might you want to try Diana Gabaldon's Outlander Series?  It starts with The Outlander, wherein a World War II nurse visits Scotland with her husband and finds herself tossed back to 1743.  How will she hide all her 20th-century nursey knowledge?  How will she protect herself, all alone in the middle of a bunch of warrior-clansmen?  And how the heck does she get back to her dear modern-day husband?  How long might it take?  What will he think of her absence?  When she returns, might things get a little complicated?  Especially if she were pregnant?

But wait!  Before you get started, maybe you should make a little something to eat.  LAYERED PICNIC LOAVES won't take very long, and these sandwiches are supposed to sit in the fridge for a hour.  So assemble them, then read awhile, then take them off to a picnic, throw away the paper plates and read some more.  You might be up late tonight.  No, let me rephrase that: you will be up late.  (There's cow patties, but between married people.) 

Give Me Some Connecticut Banality

This is a tale of missed opportunities.

Evidently, CHICKEN ORIENTAL SALAD is so good that if you don't hunt down the leftovers promptly, it will be too late.

2 chicken breast halves 

2 TB slivered almonds, toasted or not as desired* 

1/2 head cabbage, finely chopped, about 4 cups (I used a 16-oz. bag of coleslaw mix.)

1 pkg (3 oz.) Ramen oriental noodles, chicken flavor 

1 TB sugar 

1/2 cup vegetable oil 

1 tsp. salt 

1/4 tsp. pepper 

3 TB vinegar 

salad greens 

tomato wedges 

Cook chicken in small amount of water, covered, until tender, about 20 to 30 minutes. Dice to make 2 cups. 

Combine chicken with almonds, cabbage and uncooked noodles that have been broken up with envelope of seasonings; set aside. 

In glass jar combine sugar, oil, salt, pepper and vinegar; shake until blended. Pour over salad; toss. Add more salt and pepper as needed . Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or as long as 24 hours. Serve on crisp salad greens garnished with tomato wedges. Makes 8-10 servings, 205 - 165 calories each.

Over on the Book Pile, Bye-Bye Nesquik has tackled Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  Maybe you caught the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.  Or maybe you skipped it due to the R-rating.  

I'm betting the latter, so you will need me to tell you that Kate and Leo play April and Frank Wheeler, a suburban couple who look down on the banality of it all.   Leo hates his job in the city.  It is eight hours of looking busy, handing papers off to somebody else on the Fifteenth Floor.  Let Ordway deal with the Toledo problem.  

At home, a neighbor drops off plants for the yard and he has no idea what to do with them.  His wife beats back unhappiness by signing on with the community theater, but their play is so beset by amateur flubs that she plummets into a funk after opening night.  No matter how much Frank attempts to comfort her, April only wants him to "take your hands off me."   

Frank and April have friends, the kind of couple you go steady with just because they're your age and they live right down the road.  They need Shep and Milly--who else will play audience when Leo makes his speeches about all this banality?--and they despise them--"Honey, please tell them we can't go out later.  Say it's because of the babysitter or something."

Is that all there is in life?  

As the book jacket tells us, "they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner."

One night, Frank rides the train home from work and finds his moody April suddenly forgiving and happy.  She reveals a plan to inject meaning and zest into their lives.   Oh, yeah, I've had plans like that.  

I just want Frank and April to know that I would have loved to sample some of that Connecticut banality.  However, such things were always out of my reach, so I keep turning the pages of Yates' book, fascinated by the troubles of the unknowingly privileged.

If you know the ending, please don't spoil it for me just yet. 

Credits: Managing Your Meals by Winifred Jardine.

 

Oh, No, We Missed the Lutheran Marriage Encounter!

We checked into a Chicago hotel Friday night and soon discovered that we were sharing the premises with the Lutheran Marriage Encounter.  All those nice people walking in with their notebooks--I wonder what they hoped to improve over the weekend.  

Half the fun of hotels is sharing them with Groups.  We've passed through lobbies full of Mary Kay reps (High heels!  Perfect faces!  Pink Escalades!) and kiddie pageants (High heels!  Perfect faces!  Pink sequins!).

I really regret not crashing that kiddie pageant.  No, it's not the little girls I want to see.  It's their mothers whose hearts beat with hopes, dreams and savage competitive fervor.

Sadly, all I got to do was sit by the front door, watching them tote in wig heads and cosmetic cases and plastic-draped dance costumes. Some day, though.

I wonder what it would have been like to crash the marriage encounter.

Well, wonder no more!   They have a website. 

It says couples spend 48 hours "in a relaxed and private setting," "time away from daily pressures and responsibilities."  Everybody sits through a presentation. Then they get an assignment question and go off to discuss it in private.  They come back for another presentation, another question.  Repeat until 48-hour clock runs out.

One page on their site offers help with "dialog":  "Having trouble coming up with good questions?  These should help."

I guess Mr. Nesquik and I could just fix ourselves with all the handy questions provided by the Lutherans.

So, let's get started, shall we?

"How do I feel when you reach out to others more than me?"
"When I think of taking the day off, I think of . . ."
"How do I feel thinking of standing at the end of your coffin?"
"Scripture dialog:  Song of Solomon, chapter 7, verses . . ."

Whoa.  Back up.  Never mind.   

At any rate, all our Chicago plans left us too busy to improve our marriage.  Not only that, but I made a pittance of progress on Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?  I can, however, tell you more about the characters you'll meet, should you decide to pick up this engaging read.

Last week, we talked about Reggie, the British nanny.  Reggie tends the child of Dr. Hunter, a woman who trusts rather too much.  She married a man she treated in the emergency room.  His business interests include "a little of this and a little of that."  We can't be sure all his businesses are on the up-and-up.

Then there's Louise, a police detective who knows she thinks too much about death and danger and mayhem.  She saw a therapist for awhile and she got as far as imagining a nice trunk at the bottom of the sea, a place to toss all her negative thoughts.  But when she tried to replace them with positive ones, she couldn't come up with any.

The sad-sack guy detective from the last Atkinson book shows up  again in Good News.

I'm eager for more.  If only life would slow down a bit  . . .

At this frantic pace, I only have time to cook things like:

Cool Cucumber Pasta

We love this salad, even when I leave things out, which I did today.   But that's how things have been lately. My house is a turmoil of unpacked luggage and unsorted mail. I went to Kroger, but forgot the credit card.  I made dessert and forgot to turn off the oven.  It spent all night cooking its own air.

And my marriage remains unencountered, my library book unfinished.

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

You Wouldn't Expect it

They say it'll be sweater weather by the end of the week.  They say these infernal snow walls built up along the street will whittle down.

It's like waking up and trying to remember a former life.  You mean we won't have to cancel every party we plan?  No more wincing against the wind as we walk into the grocery store?  No more driving slow over the ice crust that the plowers haven't bothered to scrape off the streets?  

You mean, I could even dream of taking walks again?  

Well, wouldn't that be nice.  Me and my walking shoes have seen some pretty territory out there, neighborhoods tucked back where you didn't know anything beautiful could be.   What a cute little park, and all the houses facing it just so!   Zounds! A mansion in this part of town?  Oh, my, somebody went overboard with the railroad-themed street names here.  

Until then, we tackle The Leopard, by Giuseppe de Lampedusa, which concerns a Silician prince in 1860, whose fiefdom is on the wane.  His upstart neighbor purchased some land through foreclosures, and now the neighbor is richer than the prince. 

The prince's tenants pay their rent in kind, presenting him with cheeses he doesn’t like, and slaughtered lambs whose falling entrails put him in mind of dead soldier he recently saw rotting beside the road.   

Political matters in Sicily threaten to topple his world.  And the resident priest on his estate reminds  him that he needs to come in to confession because, yes, the prince has been naughty.  He ignores his wife, the mother of his seven children, and slips into town where he knows a certain fetching peasant girl.  No cow patties.

On the page where I left off yesterday, a love triangle was just heating up. 

If you dig in to this story, expect to be confused by the legion of characters, many of whom go by at least three different names.  But sometimes these obscure books by minor authors make for an interesting little side trip, like a walk tucked back in a neighborhood where you didn’t know anything beautiful could be.  

And on that theme of interesting side trips, here’s a dish I doubt I would have thought up myself.  Quite possibly the CEO of Pillsbury wanted a boost in sales.  "Write better copy!" he told the advertisers.  "Invent more crescent roll recipes!" he told the test kitchen cooks.  

Corny Ham Bundles