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.

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. 

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.

 

Scalloped Nerves

Oh, sure, of course I got out my little watermelon-sculpting knife and created this scalloped beauty, which I pridefully carried to the family picnic yesterday.

Ha.  No. It traveled to the picnic in an ordinary Rubbermaid bin. 

Though it would have been easier, I tell you, to cut that shell and each little melon ball, too, using rusty nail clippers, than it was to get this picture out of my disco-era cookbook and onto this blog.

The only thing scalloped around here is my nerves.   

WATERMELON SUPREME

1 large oblong watermelon
1 cantaloupe
1 honeydew melon
1 pineapple
2 peaches or nectarines
2 cups blueberries
Honey-Lime Sauce

Scoop balls or cut chunks of the melons, using about 3 cups each. Remove rind and core from pineapple (or have Kroger do it). Cut fruit into bite-sized pieces. Mix with melon balls; cover and refrigerate. Just before serving, slice peaches. Drain melon balls and pineapple pieces. Mix all fruit in large bowl. Drizzle with Honey-Lime Sauce. Pour fruit into watermelon shell. Garnish with mint leaves, if desired and serve immediately.


HONEY-LIME SAUCE:
1/2 cup ginger ale
3 TB honey
2 TB lime juice

Mix all ingredients.  Drizzle over fruit.

Back in the Patrick Melrose novels, we have finished installment #2, Bad News, in which Patrick constantly shoots drugs into his battered veins while the cask which holds his hated father's ashes falls into his hands.

In book #3, Some Hope, Patrick swears off the drugs but fails to take up anything that might fill the void.  His crowd, some of whom are still unaware that he would gladly have booted Daddy's ashes over a bridge railing, gather for a high-society birthday party.  Romantic treacheries abound.  You'd think Shakespeare had whispered plot hints into the ear of author St. Aubyn.  Add in the modern twist of Patrick's old drug dealer making light of his Narcotics Anonymous meetings and you've got yourself a small village of characters, all of whom regard each other as ghastly, but wouldn't miss that birthday party for the world.  I wonder whose reputations will still be intact the next morning.

Credits:  Betty Crocker Cookbook, ca. 1982

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.

Literary Cheese Puffs

A Montana cowpoke that falls for a night-class teacher.   Two brothers that would like to throw each other off the ski lift.  A father in mourning, doing what he should've hired a detective to do.   An Argentine aristocrat, longing for the old days.

These are some of the people that appear in Maile Meloy's short story collection,  Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.

Meloy's characters just want to know that they matter to someone.  No, wait.  Only half of them pull your heartstrings that way.  The other half display monumental selfishness, throwing their near and dear away like empty water bottles.  Meloy's tales kept me on her what-will-happen-next hook, but when I closed the last page, I couldn't remember a single one of them.  It was as if I had wolfed down a bag of Cheese Puffs.  Airy and unsatisfying, they only make you want to search the cupboards for some other junk to fill the void.  

Maybe the trouble with short stories is that the reader moves from one person to the next--college girl, wronged wife, pitiful floozy--never knowing enough, never stopping long enough to care.  I can see the most interesting people in Wal-Mart, wearing what ought to be pajamas, and forget them a half-hour later.  But as for people at church, I remember their hometowns, their wardrobes, their visiting relatives and their oddest comments in Relief Society, simply because I'm with them long enough for all this minutiae to build up and stick.

But let us recognize Meloy for her many awards.  She writes a well-constructed tale.  A lot of well-constructed tales, actually, even if they are populated with people you wouldn't want as neighbors or relatives.  

As long as we're dealing with fleeting characters, why don't we celebrate one of nature's most fleeting foods -- the strawberry.


My mother-in-law grew strawberries, sending jars of freezer jam to our house every June.  The jam lasted not much longer than the third week in July.  The second-best way of remembering Grandma and her strawberry crop was the jello she brought to holiday dinners, rich and thick with berries she had frozen the summer before.  The woman hates cooking; she would rather spend Christmas playing with the kids and their new toys, then serve pot pies for dinner.  On the effort scale, this jello was as high as she would go.

For my children, a  holiday isn't holiday without:

GRANDMA JELLO

1 container (16 oz.) frozen, sweetened, sliced strawberries

1 package (6 oz.) strawberry jello

2 cups boiling water

2 bananas

2 cups mini-marshmallows

Partially thaw the berries in the microwave, 1 minute at 30%.  

Dissolve the jello in boiling water.  Add the berries, stirring until they break up into bite-sized chunks.  Chill for 15-20 minutes, or until syrupy.  Slice the bananas, stir into the jello mixture.  Stir in marshmallows.  Pour into a serving bowl or 9x13-inch pan.  Chill for four hours.  Serves 8 at 200 cals. each. 

Can't Go Wrong with Bacon

I love my UrbanSpoon app.  I love the way it nudges me to try new, independent restaurants all over town.  Aren't I just the queen of variety, sampling barbecue up on the northwest side, and sandwiches slicked over with garlic butter down in Bloomington and waffle cones in Cincinnati?  

Then again, maybe not.  I can pick up a menu, splashed with colorful pictures of foodie wonders and, more often than not, end up with bacon on my plate.  I've just got a finder for it.  Cats hunt mice.  Bees detect flowers.  Dust finds computer screens.  Bye-bye Nesquik's menu-searching eye skips over the meatball sandwiches, the garlicky pasta, the fried potato skins and lands straight on something with bacon in it.

I'm sure this wouldn't happen to me in an ice cream parlor, although I hear bacon has made inroads there, too.

But really, how can a wrap or a salad or a burger go wrong if you add a strip or two of pig to it?

Even when I'm not looking for bacon, it finds me.  I chose this salad because of the picture.  I didn't even notice that stuff hiding between the carrots and the spinach, but look at the ingredient list and you will see that my finder has, once again, sniffed out the bacon.  Bacon wants to be my friend.

Pretty Layered Salad


As for the Finished Book Pile, it's more like the started book pile as I give Nathaniel Hawthorne another try.  So far, I've swallowed a short story about a minister that takes to wearing a black veil.  I understand this eccentricity about as well as I understood why Hester Prynne wouldn't reveal her fellow adulterer.  But just like we are eating spinach, carrots and peppers today, I'm making myself sit down to a helping of literary vegetables.

Please pray for me.

Oops, Mom and Dad, I Lost Her

Somebody in my writing group keeps handing us chapters of her novel about a family broken up by a fatal car accident. The narrator girl and her father struggle through the year after losing Mom and Big Brother. We get a lot of silence-at-breakfast scenes, losing-ourselves-in-competitive-swimming scenes and re-entering-teen-life-with-a-birthday-party-at-the-country-club scenes. (Where, naturally, a hunky boy appears. With an Aussie accent. And he's a swimmer, how handy!)

As she perfects her book, I'm tempted to suggest a look at Francine Prose's Goldengrove. I would mean it as a helpful gesture. I just don't know if it would be taken that way.

Basically, Prose already wrote the same story. Two sisters laze about in a canoe on the lake beside their rustic upstate New York home. The older one jumps out, as if to swim ashore. The younger one rows to the dock. In the house, the parents ask, "Where is your sister?" The answer is not good.

Prose walks us through the next year, as this family struggles up from the depths of loss. The book jacket promises a "risky relationship" between the thirteen-year-old surviving girl and her sister's boyfriend.

Oh, great! I thought, a bunch of unwarranted, highly anatomical sex scenes. And if anyone complains, they are told, 'Teenagers have sex these days. Get over it.'"

But no, Prose keeps it less about sex and more about head-games. It all rang quite true to me. I found this grieving family utterly captivating.

Not so for the next book I picked up. Brunonia Berry's Lace Reader is a tale about moms and aunts who can tell fortunes by looking at -- you guessed it -- lace. The story bolted out of the gate with a whole lotta characters (way quirky, of course)and a whole lotta details about nothin' that I quickly suspected I had fallen prey to an amateur author. When she finally introduced me to the second aunt, who greets the protagonist with a hug and acts quite normal given the family death they have all just experienced, I pictured a quite normal woman who, I found out a page or two later, is brain damaged.

"Foul!" I cried. "Game over."

Seriously, the Amazon reviews made far better reading.

Maybe somebody in Berry's writing group should have handed her an already-published masterpiece about fortune-telling women who come together after a death in the family and . . . oh never mind!

Anyway, to finish up with our Tex-Mex series, you can celebrate warmer weather with:

Tex-Mex Chicken Salad

Playing with Matches

The grass is a sickly yellow. The shrunken edges of our pond reveal grassy banks that usually remain well hidden. The weeds have taken over every lawn along my walking routes.

Given this droughty state of things, we have been warned not to play with matches around here, or fireworks, or any other sparky things.

I'm on board with this, having recently seen pictures of Colorado cars fleeing in front of a wall of orange flame.

I'm especially on board after reading John Pipkin's Woodsburner, a fictionalized treatment of a real event.

It concerns Henry David Thoreau, of Walden Pond fame. A year before he went into the woods to commune with the flora and fauna, he set them afire one dry and windy April day. He merely wanted to cook a chowder. But the flames outmaneuvered him in short order and rushed towards the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

Pipkin brings Thoreau and three or four other characters to life. There is a preacher addled by opium (his chapters were slow-going for me), a bookseller who hopes to expand his empire and a Scandinavian farm hand. Cow patties aplenty.

As for your recipe, we went all out for fruit salads recently, snapping up blueberries and strawberries and eating them this way and that. You can start with the more healthful version:

Poppy Seed Fruit Salad

Next, you can try something a little more sugared up. Since it features marshmallows, it is, in my mind, a very Mormon salad:

Marshmallow Fruit Salad

Complete This Sentence

My pet peeves. A list. No, just one item. Big one though.

Sentence fragments. Drive me nuts. Doubling over. In pain. Oh, the pretentiousness!

That's why I quit The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor. Amazon fell in love with this book, touting it as one of the best of whatever year it came out. A story about simple people who have a good idea and start up a company sounds tempting, no? I love those kinds of stories.

But Taylor, man of fragments, came off like a rank amateur. Maybe he should try his hand at haiku.

I did, however, love running my fingers over the embossed bird wings on the book jacket.

Next up, Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. I had my doubts. The cover was a dull gray, and no embossed bird wings to fondle.

But now I understand why Twain is famous. We have no plot here, and too many characters to remember. We're talking about a twisty, long river, for goodness sakes, and the people who pilot it and put up with its floody moods. Still, between Twain's exaggerations and his self-deprecations, he makes it all (well, most of it) quite engaging.

He begins in his boyhood, where all his little friends in Hannibal, MO, watched the steamboats chugging up and down the river. They all longed to get on those boats and Live Life. Finally, one of the Hannibal boys hired on to a boat, and when he returned to tell his adventures, to brag about how well he knew "St. Looy," they "envied him and loathed him."

You have to slow down and adopt the rhythms of yesteryear to enjoy Twain's book. But at least the man completes his sentences. I'm sorry that he's long gone. I'm sure he would have made for a most interesting dinner guest.

As for your dinner, I offer  Almond Raspberry Tossed Salad. This is for people who would rather skip vegetables and go straight to dessert. If we make the green stuff interesting enough and sweet enough, I will devour it.

We served this at the Jim's wedding "rehearsal dinner." All the new relatives got along great. I think the salad deserves the credit.

Dud Pile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We ate:

Sweet 'n Spicy Chicken

Dad's Favorite Salad

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




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


It was an easy and yummy dinner.

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

I Can't Stay Away From This Stuff

Let's start this time with the food.

Chili Corn Bread Salad


I don't want to stay away from this stuff. I want to eat the whole pan! This is why I need a life of the mind, so I don't languish, thinking of the corn bread, the bacon, the cheese, the gooey ranch dressing stuff, the . . .

Ahem.

Where were we now?

Oh, yes. Life of the mind. Reading books and all that.

So I read Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue, about a woman who dies, but stays "between," which means she hangs around the living, spying on them, creating cool breezes, moving mugs and pens, whatever. That might make it sound like a comedy, but Thin Air takes itself pretty seriously.

The story moves around in time. We're in the 1920s when the main character dies, then we move to the present, then before she dies, then . . . Keeping all the characters sorted out was beyond me. People float in and out (literally! being dead and all). And finally, the author shows an insufferable contempt for people who don't believe the way she does.

I'm not sure how a book like this made it through the editorial catch-nets.

I gave it up. It certainly wasn't enough to keep me from thinking about cornbread, and cheese, and bacon and . . .

Whoa. Let me get ahold of myself here.

Why don't we move on to Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead. The unnammed protagonist is a professional namer. Corporations call him in to re-ignite their brands--be they medicines, candies or styrofoam cups--with a zippy new name.

So a quiet little town that's in the middle of remaking itself into a booming, business-friendly burg calls him to re-name the place, something that will project its new, forward-thinking ways.

Everybody has a different opinion of what this name should be. The great-grandson of the tycoon that brought barbed-wire manufacturing to the town thinks one thing. The mayor, a descendant of the freed slaves that founded the place, thinks another. Add to that the relentlessly cheerful entrepreneur who's bringing in new business and all his opinions and you have tugs in every direction.

Apex was a witty and enjoyable ride, roasting all the ingredients of a town and contemplating what names mean to us all. I think you might like it.

He and I Aren't the Same Kind of Cook

Let's start today with The Finished Book Pile.

We have If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, a collection of short stories by Robin Black.

Her conversational little stories grew on me. Black writes about quiet people, many of them aged and broken down. Mostly, I remember Jean, hiding her stroke-affected arm in a fancy-scarf sling, claiming it's some small injury. Her daughter has come home for a few days. Is she home to help out? Or is she up to something else? What are those odd night-time noises?

It's not the most memorable book, but it has some nice moments. Minimal cow patties.

Next up, The Saucier's Apprentice by Bob Spitz.

You know, you go to the big downtown library and you pick your book off the shelf. You take it to the front desk and hand it to the girl who works there. Now these library types are quiet people who don't always look you in the eye. They put up with their low-paying jobs because the love being around books, love handling them. They love books more than they love people, I'm pretty sure. It's a not-quite-human experience, this passing your book back and forth and bleeping it through the check-out scanner.

But I gave The Saucier's Apprentice to the girl and her eyes lit up just a little bit and she peeked out from her quiet, withdrawn face. "Best title ever," she said, as she cracked a tiny smile.

And a darn good read. Mr. Spitz's life ran aground. Being a man who loved to throw dinner parties for his friends, what better way to soothe his sore soul than to send himself to a few cooking schools in Europe? With every delightful turn of phrase, the reader travels along with him as he and another man turn the act of making souffle into a contest of manhood; as a snooty French chef refuses to teach Spitz anything until Spitz shows he can make a decent omelet (guess how many omelets it takes); as an American expat woman introduces Spitz to the art of cooking rabbit.

Spitz can't do it. To him, they're bunnies, soft and adorable, with cute long ears. But the woman goads him further by taking a jar off the shelf, pulling out a dark and ominous object and making him eat it. Find out for yourself what it is.

Spitz includes his cooking-school recipes. I don't plan to try them, because he and I are not the same kind of cook. He likes simple, local ingredients, and improvisation. I like sure-bet formulas and don't get the vapors from ingredients like Velveeta and ketchup. However, I loved reading about chefs who flick the pan just so and the omelet slips out perfectly. Or they push the knife just so and the meat pops right off the bone. I loved reading about people who sat on terraces in what sounds like the most beautiful scenery on this earth and said, "MM-MM-MM" as they ate marvelous things.

Which brings me to our recipe for this installment:

Something Special Salad


I could not stop saying, "MM-MM-MM" while I ate this.

I've told you before that I just can't think of things to put in salads. Somebody has to tell me exactly what to add. I know that the rest of you don't have that problem, judging by the salads that you bring to my house.

Unless you're stealing your ideas from elsewhere, like I do. After all, stealing ideas is what we're all about here at Bye-bye Nesquik, no?

A Cool Celtic Name Isn't Everything

Aiobheann Sweeney. That's the author of the book that I'm about to not recommend to you, Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking. I looked forward to seeing a picture of this person. What does an Aiobheann look like?

She was a nice brown-eyed, brown-haired Celtic type.

Her book rode along rather aimlessly, even sleepily. A motherless girl lives on a Maine Island with her father. They don't converse much. One day, he finds her a job in NYC and she goes to the big city to learn about life. (By then, I wasn't sure why Ms. Sweeney wrote the Maine half of the book. I guess it's fun to write about fog and boats.)

Anyway, off to the city. Our heroine, Miranda, faces a choice: boyfriend named Nate? Or girlfriend named Ana?

Many cow patties to skip over.

So let's talk about food instead. Here's a meal that went together pretty quickly on a Sunday packed with meetings and appointments. I was literally running from the moment I raised my head off the pillow until sunset. Oh, wait--there was a quiet half-hour after church, when I brought my sleeping grandson home, leaving the rest of the family in extra meetings. I sneaked myself a pudding, then donned my apron and started banging cupboard doors.

Which woke the boy up.

Honey-Dijon Chicken

Creamy Italian Noodles

Sunny Broccoli Salad

And how about cookies 'n cream ice cream for dessert?

Natalie says it tasted just right on a summer day.

I thought of you, LD

Today, I've got something for the cooks that find themselves in a Boring Side-Dish Rut. We feature a salad. I'm pretty lazy about salads. I open a bag of pre-cut greens, toss in some grape tomatoes and slice up some cucumber and expect the diners at my table to be happy with it, week after week after week. Nothing else goes into a salad unless a recipe specifically tells me to put it in there. So let's do:

Swiss Tossed Salad

I actually prefer various bottled dressings over the mayo/sour cream one. The only problem with this salad is that the heavy stuff (the Swiss cheese) sinks to the bottom. It's hard to fish all the ingredients out of the bowl equally. But I like these flavors together. Thanks, Quick Cooking Magazine.

As for the finished book pile, I thought of Lora Dawn every time I picked up Playing Doctor by Joseph Turow, a book about TV doctor shows.

First, my doctor show anecdote: I grew up without TV--alas! Well, we had a TV, but it didn't work. My mom said it needed a picture tube. She said picture tubes were expensive. How expensive? I figured they must cost just less than a space rocket, an impression Mother never bothered to correct.

All this changed on general conference weekends. Mom and Dad left town for Salt Lake City. Noel and Hertha came over to "babysit" Jana and I. And they always brought TVs! For watching Saturday morning cartoo -- er, excuse me -- talks by apostles.

Well, OK, we did fit in a little secular viewing. Like the night we watched Medical Center. A young engaged couple came in to see the handsome Dr. Joe Gannon. The fiancee wasn't feeling too well. Dr. Gannon ran a few tests. Then he took her aside privately and told her she had . . . Gonorrhea!

I couldn't figure out why her fiance reacted with such stunned shock. I couldn't figure out why the adults in my own living room all looked at each other with nervous laughs.

"What's gonorrhea?" I asked.

"Ask your mother," Hertha retorted, with an end-of-discussion finality in her voice.

Anyhoo, Turow's book covers the mania that broke out when Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare began on TV in the early '60s. Women swooning! Women writing the actors for advice about their medical (even their gynecological) problems! Then, in the '70s, along came Marcus Welby, M.D. and Medical Center. Robert Young, the actor who played Welby, identified thoroughly with the role. After years of depression and alcoholism, he needed a personality to adopt, so he adopted Welby's. When the woman who played his nurse felt a little under the weather, he reached out and took her pulse.

Playing Doctor gets rather bogged down in discussions about the AMA trying to exercise control over doctors' TV images, and the networks constantly trying to figure out the perfect doctor-show formula while keeping the genre fresh. True medical-drama fans may find the book a little thin on behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

But even some of the network machinations can be interesting. For instance, Emergency!, in the '70s, was thrown on to the schedule against the very popular All in the Family. Network execs thought that there must be people out there who either didn't understand Archie Bunker, or couldn't stand him. Give them something else to watch! However, each Emergency! episode was written with three or four vignettes per show. The biggest, most expensive emergency (say, something with explosions) always fell in the third segment, right at 8:30 when, over on the other channel, Archie Bunker was just finishing up. Capture Archie's audience!

The book finished up with M*A*S*H and St. Elsewhere. Too bad it was written clear back in 1988. Wouldn't we love to know what Turow had to say about E.R. and Scrubs?

Next up: What Are the Odds? by Mike Orkin. "Chance in Everyday Life." I'm a few pages in and that's enough for me. I don't want my books peppered with equations and math-professor jokes. But if you're dying to know what the chances are that a tossed coin will turn up heads 100% of the time, or if you're trying to refine your casino strategy, give it a whirl. All the jacket praise says Orkin makes the subject fascinating.

I kinda like reading the Yellow Pages better.

Prom Dining at the Food Court?

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

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

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

Curry Chicken Croissants

Country Baked Beans


Fruit Salad w/ Apricot Dressing

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

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

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


VANILLA BUTTER FROSTING

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

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

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

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

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

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