In Honor of Angela's Visit . . .

Fountains. Vine-covered bridges. Monuments. Handsome old churches. Plazas and shady walking paths.

Thanks to Angela's recent visit, these are all some things I got to see in my home city, things I had forgotten about, things I never visit on my own.

After our tour, we returned home. David showed up soon. He practiced his medical skills on Skooby, and told me all about adjusting to his ward in Philadelphia ("Lots of West Africans. Now that we've gotten to know them, we love them") while I chopped vegetables for:

Summer Garden Pasta

We ate it with grilled chicken and a frothy, frozen dessert of pulverized strawberries and cream.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.

I wasn't sure I would stick with this one. It started with a dinner party of merchant-class Germans, set back in the time when gout was fashionable. As the party guests laughed at jokes I didn't get, and as I felt the 600-page heft of the book in my hands, I promised myself I could ditch it another 20 pages or so if it didn't get better.

Then I met Antonie Buddenbrooks. A young daughter of privilege, she goes around town mocking those beneath her, particularly an up-and-coming businessman whose beard is so yellow it looks painted. And he wants to marry her! And her parents push the marriage because he is obviously headed for great prosperity. It would be so fitting to unite the house of Buddenbrooks with Herr Yellow-Beard, would it not? But Antonie still feels nothing but disdain for him. What will she do?

Antonie, from age 16 to age 50, proved to be quite the drama queen, pulling me through these 600 pages, this fat feast of fortunes rising and falling. Oh, the trials God sends her! she exclaims as she dabs her hanky to her eyes, then recovers just enough to modestly say that she wouldn't dream of telling anybody how to run the funeral/the dinner party/the family business, then goes ahead and tells them how to do it anyway.

Every book needs a good drama queen.

Thomas Mann's most famous book is probably Dr. Faustus.

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 Failed at Faulkner, Now I've Failed at Rushdie

Did I ever tell you the story of the clamshells?

When we bought this house, we had three weeks before move-in day for John to paint away the rust color in the living room and the extreme orange in the loft. I thought it might be nice to pack him a dinner every night. I thought it would be cool to package it all up in a clamshell, just like fast food and doggy bags and things like that.

I went looking for styrofoam clamshells. Sam's Club had them--in packages of 100.

I could not give up my little clamshell idea, so I bought the whole 100 and hoped John would not tease me too badly about it.

I ended up not regretting that purchase because--you know what?--every time somebody has a baby and the ladies want you to sign up for a meal, one of the big headaches is deciding how to package it up.

No problem. Got ninety or so clamshells here.

Then we feed the missionaries by sending them Friday's leftovers.

No problem. Got eighty or so clamshells here.

Then Natalie comes to Sunday dinner. Talking her in to taking home some leftovers is easy.

And no problem. Got seventy or so clamshells here.

Anyway, I just used up my first 100 and went out and bought my second.

Here's what went into the clamshell this week:

Sausage French Bread Pizza


The original recipe called for raw vegetables, but I like them soft. Actually, just a bit blackened.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we must admit that, again, we didn't finish something. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children promises to tell the story of Saleem Sinai, who was born on the exact same midnight in which India gained her independence. Saleem tells his first-person tale to Padma (wife? girlfriend? housekeeper? I never figured it out) and takes so long to get to the actual birth that she complains bitterly about all the delays and tangents and "nonsense" in the story.

I couldn't keep everybody straight. I didn't like any of the characters. I didn't want to face a world where snakes come out of toilets. I kept falling asleep.

One day I opened the book and read, "It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life." I wanted to say, "Wait up, Padma! I'm coming too!" And I closed this "marvelous epic" (says Newsweek) and picked up something else.

But I finished a book on CD. Restless me, I can hardly let a summer week go by without escaping to Chicago, or Cincinnati, or Louisville, or Columbus. The miles are long, especially after dark, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles really made the cornfields and the Taco Bell billboards fly by.

Tess' face kept changing as I listened to her soft little Cockney accent. My young Tess was Helena Bonham Carter. I could just see the abundant kinky hair. Later, when she defended that husband of hers and sounded kind of incoherent, she turned into Kristen Stewart. Then she turned into someone in my ward. Then, when she appeared in fine lady clothes, she went blonde (!).

And speaking of defending that husband, I just wanted to throw the book across the room. But I had no book and I was not in a room. I was on a freeway, defending myself against sleepy truckers and gotcha state troopers. I could only bang my fist on the steering wheel and cry out, "Come on, Tess! Get mad! Gosh, did wives really act like this?"

The ending was completely unexpected. Wrapping things up just as I pulled into town from Columbus, the final scene clanged like a sad bell while I drove across the reservoir bridge a few miles from home.

Oops, did I give away too much?

That Thomas Hardy knows how to spin a tale.

I Need a Laugh Track

By now, we know that Scooby likes Cheerios, peanut butter, ice cream, brownies and, most especially, Honey Butter Ritz crackers. But anything pungent or garlicky makes his face screw up as if we had waved something three-days-dead under his nose.

He wouldn't have liked what I'm sharing with you this week. However, you are all adults. You are expected to appreciate flavor.

Vegetable Cheese Tortellini


As suggested by the Taste of Home page on which this recipe appeared, we ate it with burgers and banana cream pie.

And Scooby demanded some of that pie.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh (it's a guy) was a master of British humor. And while I'm convinced that the British are pretty funny (I've watched my share of BritComs), someone had to tell me that Pride and Prejudice was a comedy. I just didn't realize it when I read it. All that propriety gets in the way.

Now, if I see actors playing out the story, I get it, yes I do. I think I need the laugh track.

Anyway, I tackled Waugh, telling myself, "This is comedy. You watch out for it now." I actually caught myself bursting into laughter about three times, though I'm sure Waugh deserved more out of me. It's just that I'm one of his more handicapped readers.

So I recommend Handful of Dust, knowing that you are a little more loosened up, a little quicker on the uptake than I am. Have fun with it.

La Leche League, Victorian Chapter

"Fruit and meat don't go together," said one of my children.

That didn't stop me, of course. Nor did it stop them from eating sweet and sour meatballs, chock full of pineapple.

Other cooks out there have been discovering wonderful ways to combine fruits and meats, sending their ideas to my favorite cooking magazines. This one came from a guy in New Jersey.

Chicken with Blueberry Sauce 

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer. The story is about a woman back in the day who, as you might guess, breastfeeds other women's children. Reading it often felt like I was attending a meeting of the La Leche League True Believers, Victorian Chapter. All the breast-feeding talk is pretty frank.

However, the story gripped me right away. I found it easy to put aside things like reading blogs and web-shopping for tote bags or whatever, and read about the upstairs/downstairs drama of servant life. But when Eisdorfer really wound up the tension, when she had me gasping and saying, "Oh, my goodness! Oh no!", her plotting took a turn towards the contrived.

Be warned: there are some cow patties. Susan, our wet nurse heroine, fell from grace and never quite picked herself up again.

Eating Cashews and Balancing Politics

It's been an excruciatingly boring food week. Sunday was a day of intrigue and upset affairs and I just couldn't pull things together enough to fix what was on the menu. Then my husband went off to Atlanta and there was little reason to cook anything at all.

Then one day, I don't remember when, I bought the ingredients I forgot to buy earlier and threw together:

Cashew Turkey Pasta Salad

I made half the recipe and sent some off with Natalie. I hope you ate it, Natalie, because if you didn't, I want it back. That was good stuff.

Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Surrender Is Not an Option by John Bolton.

Bolton was a conservative ambassador to the UN. He also had a lot of jobs at the Department of State. Something about working for the government turns you into a person that writes in endless acronymns. Readers had better pay attention. If they don't, they will soon be deep into paragraphs about the EAP's position papers on the DPRK and they will have to read back a page or two to figure out that the EAP is the East Asia Pacific group and the DPRK is North Korea. And more of the same throughout the book. Bolton's world is one long game of Boggle.

The best parts of Surrender are the private asides that the government types say to each other, like "Maybe I should act more like Jesse Helms" or "This [committee] isn't worth a bucket of warm spit."

There's just an awful lot wade through, with a wide cast of characters. If Girls' State was the most meaningful experience of your young life, then you might find something interesting in here, but Surrender is nothing I'd risk an overdue fine for.

Plus, it's a little heavy for bathtub reading.

Next up, Independent People by Halldor Laxness. Once you open the pages, you will be thrust into the bleak moors of Iceland at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, things are so bleak, it seems like the middle ages. When the farmers gather, they never fail to discuss the worm problems in their sheep. The patroness of the town, who lives in a house with a tower and servants, stuffs up every public occasion with windy speeches about the nobility of rural life, though she hasn't the faintest idea how freaking hard it is. Our main character, Bjartur, reminds me of a certain crusty farmer I have known.

Back in the fifties, Laxness won either the Nobel or the Pulitzer prize for this book. His conclusion about humanity: most of them really can't afford to live. Like all good book prize winners, he was a socialist.

Calling all chemists, philosophers and other brainy types

How long 'til dinner? And I don't think there's enough of last night's leftovers. Jim and Mercy are on their way here, so that means extra mouths to feed (love it!). Maybe if I placate them with chicken nuggets, they will let me clean up the rest of the --

Bow Tie Chicken Supper


Over on the Finished Book Pile, we have Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic by Daniel Harris. Harris reveals the choices advertisers make to appeal to our longings for cuteness, quaintness, coolness, cleanliness and so forth.

Harris also skewers us all for having such longings in the first place.

Are you into natural foods? Eating for the sake of your health? Then he will call you out for taking a vitamin, "one unobtrusive tablet, a deceptively small commodity that houses the entire farm within its fragile sucrose shell."

Do you love to be zany? "Zaniness," he says, "allows us to misbehave and yet minimizes our risk of being ostracized as eccentric." In other words, you're a chicken-hearted rebel.

Is glamour your thing? Well, the industry that sells it to us "turns women into malcontents always scheming against their wardrobes and thus keeps them returning to department stores." Translation: as soon as you buy that must-have pencil skirt, it will go out of style and they'll make you think you need an A-line instead.

While Harris reveals some interesting tidbits about the images thrust before us, he will surely burst the bubble on one or two of your favorite notions about yourself.

Contains a couple cow patties.

Next up, we have Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein. I really doubt anybody I know would like this novel. The heroine is struggling through a graduate degree in philosophy and she eventually marries a math genius. Their conversations are so dry and high-minded, it's kind of unreal. That's not to say that Goldstein forgot to put any humor in her book, but I'm gonna say the dryness is Strike One against the book.

She's quite candid about her sex life. That's Strike Two. (And this tale feels very autobiographical.)

She's preoccupied with the question of what our true essence is. Our mind? Our body? Some variation of the two? To me, that's a resolved question. Strike Three.

But it was set in Princeton. That's why I stuck with it. Goldstein explains the place. I ate that part up.

Next up, Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. Ettlinger took his kids to the shore. Ettlinger bought them ice cream bars. Ettlinger's daughter read the label and said, "Daddy, what's polysorbate 60?"

So journalist Ettlinger embarked on a study of the ingredients in our foods, how they are formulated, and where they come from. Utterly fascinating. That fact that there is ground up bits of iron in the flour I eat didn't gross me out at all. Nor did the fact that shortening gets washed in hydrochloric acid (which is later washed out). An army of chemists out there have been experimenting with every conceivable element, peering under microscopes, perfecting one thing and another until they know just how to make a cake taste like its full of eggs and butter when it's not.

I wore out a little at the end when he got into the chapters on stuff like calcium caseinate and diglycerides (someone who has taken chemistry might follow it better) but I perked up again when he launched into food colors and flavors.

Let's just say that I now understand why I'm creaming the butter and sugar when I whip up a batch of cookies.