Somewhere Between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen"

"Did you find everything all right today?" said the grocery store cashier.

"Yes, I did, and I was looking for a lot of weird stuff," I told her.

Like spreadable goat cheese.   And pesto.  And roasted red peppers.

We've got a Fast Sunday tradition around here of eating a big meal made made from all new recipes (also known as Dishwasher's Dismay). Currently, we're working our way through a magazine feature on tailgate meals.

You never know with new recipes whether the stuff will actually taste good.  But today was a winner!

Get yourself acquainted with the fancy-cheese section of your grocery and store and make:

Italian-Style Sandwiches

I found the roasted meat in the lunchmeat section, somewhere between plastic-packaged ham steaks and tubs of ready-made mashed potatoes.  The store didn't have ciabatta rolls, but I'm sure you can find something exotic to try.  As for arugula, I couldn't be bothered to hunt very hard.  Good old leaf lettuce did us fine.  Serves 4.  On 4-oz. rolls, our sandwiches came in at 820 calories each.

 Layered Cornbread Salad

We've featured another cornbread salad on Bye-Bye Nesquik before.  It remains our favorite, but today's is still good enough to make it onto the official Bye-Bye Nesquik master list. 

Once we'd had time to digest a little, we ate:

Pineapple Upside-Down Carrot Cake

Let's try the whole meal again sometime, and on an actual tailgate.  Or on a picnic table beside a river bend.  Or on a bench in Central Park.  Doesn't matter; just somewhere out there.  (Can you tell I'm dying for picnic weather?  I'm sure you are, too.)

I'm trying to distract you with a lot of cooking because I have not finished my current book, The Blithedale Romance  by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Hawthorne, as we've mentioned here before, is a tough row to hoe.  His language falls somewhere between King James English and "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen."

But Blithedale is actually rather funny.  The  main character, a stand-in for Hawthorne, plays the smart-mouthed grump in this tale of Boston elites intruding themselves on plain country folk.

Hawthorne based the story on his days at Brook Farm, an experiment in socialist living.  He and his artist friends conceived the idea of living off the land.  They believed they would achieve a form of moral justice, with some time on the side for writing poems and painting landscapes.

After a summer of shoveling a great deal of manure, and no time to write so much as a paragraph, the disillusioned Hawthorne hasted himself back to Boston to take up his former studious life.

I could've told him things would end that way.

I Want This Man's Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peanut Butter Cashew Sundaes 

I'm a Quitter

 You should eat what you want on your birthday.  

I sorta wanted one of these:  

But then I wouldn't have had room for a favorite birthday main dish.  So I'll just have to make the trip to Gigi's Cupcakes another day.

HAYSTACKS

1 lb. ground beef
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3 1/4 cups water
1 can (8 oz.) tomato sauce
1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. chili powder
1/4 cup uncooked long grain rice
3/4 tsp. salt
1 package (11 1/2 oz) corn chips
Assorted garnishes: sour cream, grated Monterey jack or Cheddar cheese, sliced ripes olives, diced green pepper

In a large skillet cook together ground beef, onion, and garlic until beef loses its color and onion is soft; drain off excess fat. Add remaining ingredients except corn chips; cover and simmer 20 minutes. Serve over corn chips with any desired garnishes.

 Recipe from Winifred Jardine's Managing Your Meals. 

Thank goodness for a week of favorite foods, because my stack of books has been so trying lately that I quit one after another.

If you want to finish Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else, you will need to have a thing for the scientist, Nikola Tesla.  She introduced him as a pigeon-feeding recluse living on the 33rd floor of a New York hotel.  A young girl in the hotel befriends him.  I don't care how much they both love pigeons; a friendship between an old man and a young girl creeps me out too much.  This is not to accuse Hunt of dirtying up what may be a perfectly innocent story.  To me, her Tesla was like an airplane seatmate that I'm perfectly happy to avoid conversing with.

Next, I tried  Bad Things Happen, a murder mystery by Harry Dolan.

Now, I respect mystery writers.  They take on a tough job, planting all those clues and giving you reason to suspect the grumpy piano player at the bar, or the troubled city manager with the gambling problem, when all along it was the star student who spends her summers on mission trips.

Yes, I respect what they do.

But there are special potholes that only mystery writers are prone to fall into.   In the search for clever, never-been-done plot twists, something that will really keep us guessing, they can twist human behavior so far out of shape that nobody's really acting human anymore.  Somebody swings a bottle at someone's head.  Somebody inaugurates an affair.   Nobody seems desperate or lonely enough to commit such rashness.  But they plunge ahead anyway, just because we need action that keeps the reader guessing.

Could it be that my brain is diminished from reading a fluffy novel last week? 

But let me just get this off my chest:  The affair is between a woman with long, flowing blonde hair (my goodness, I'm so surprised by this) and the main character.  Mrs. Blonde Hair has no particular complaints against her husband.   She suffers no clinical nymphomania symptoms.   She just gets  up one day and pursues the narrator.

Can you say "author fantasy"?

Mr. Nesquik recently completed a knights-and-druids series wherein a wizardess captures men and beds them 'til they're plumb worn out and begging for mercy.

Uh-huh, they'd all like to meet such a female.

Me, I just want to walk into the cupcake store and eat myself silly.  

Credits:  http://www.gigiscupcakesusa.com/midnightmagic

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

My Quirks are My Gift to the World

Aaaaand, we are snowbound again,  at least so far as church is concerned.  The bishop also postponed Fast Sunday.  What a wise move.  Who wants to starve without meetings to distract you?  Who wants to be housebound with famished children and  a grouchy spouse? 

Then again, I can't imagine his wife being grouchy.  

But me?  I don't take hunger well.  And as soon as I read the word "postpone" in my Facebook feed, I rushed downstairs and celebrated my reprieve with a tuna sandwich, some Doritos and a couple chocolate chip cookies.   

I must still be in starvation mode, 'cause I'm dreaming of foods.  What I'd like to find before me right now is some:  

Italian Cheese Bread

This week's book, which I have not quite finished, celebrates quirks.

Are you the happy owner of a Roget's Thesaurus? (No, that is not this week's book.)  Oh, good, me too!

I always imagined it had been created by an army of wordsmiths, toiling away deep in some British library.

But no, there was a real Peter Mark Roget.  As chronicled in Joshua Kendall's The Man Who Made Lists, Roget lived through a rocky, unsettled childhood.  Peter was a mere tot when his father died of tuberculosis.  Peter's mother didn't cope well with widowhood. Or rather, she coped by moving the family two or three times a year and by hovering insufferably over the boy. Case in point:  When Roget went off to medical school, Mama made him promise not to touch the sick people.

Peter coped by making lists.  "As a boy, Roget was compelled to crank out his word lists. Without this outlet, he may well have lapsed into the madness that gripped numerous family members."  His notebook "represented his discovery as a boy of eight what was to be his calling.  He had stumbled upon an all-encompassing intellectual pursuit: classifying the world." 

By adulthood, he suspected that his lists might be useful to the public, helping them communicate their ideas with more precision.  By the time he finally refined his lists into a real book and offered it for sale, the world grabbed it up.  Poets, novelists, scientists, letter-writers and students found, in Roget's Thesaurus, a tool that opened their minds like a flower.

I have felt that mind-opening.   In the classic editions of Roget, all his synonyms fall within 1,000 categories.   If you think you're trying to say something about "stealing" but "rob, purloin, pilfer and filch" don't quite nail the idea, your eye might wander over to the facing page, where it sees stealing's sister idea, "taking."  You realize that--Aha!--you really meant "snatch."

Modern editions of Roget, not to mention online thesauri, rob you of this fine-tuning experience.  They arrange the word concepts dictionary-style and, for all the speed which you can track down mere words, it's just not the same.

Places like the grocery store have already figured this out.  Really, can you imagine wandering down an aisle stocked with paper towels, peanut butter and pepperoni?   Pushing your cart one aisle over and finding the marshmallows, mangoes and magazines?  Isn't there something about seeing all the Mexican food together that spurs ideas?   I like the flour tortillas, but what about trying the spinach this time?  I don't know about the taco sauce.  Maybe some queso dip would hit the spot. 

Kendall's book trudges through some dry chapters.  I had almost concluded that Roget, in spite of his great gift to mankind, might not be worth more than a long newspaper article.  But then this fussy, reclusive man got caught in War.  And Love. 

At the very least, The Man Who Made Lists may make you feel better about your own quirks. 

Babysitter's Club -- Not!

What was going on at 5 a.m. at your house?

Oh, that's right, some of you actually arise at that hour and . . . what?  Run?  Read scriptures?  Sip hot chocolate while calmly jotting your to-do list?  

And the rest of you dream weird dreams, the ones where the rooms keep changing or you fall from the sky or you're back in college, finding out you just missed the entire semester.   Or you put a child back to bed and you dearly hope that he stays there.  

Well, I was trying to finish Andre Dubus' Garden of Last Days.  I gave out somewhere in the 300s of this heavy 500-page novel, but it wasn't for lack of interest.  The plot gripped me like double-stick tape; I just couldn't hold my eyes open anymore.   

It begins with April, a stripper at a Florida men's club.  She and her three-year-old daughter rent from an elderly woman, Jean.   Jean babysits the adorable tot while April dances.  But one night, Jean doesn't feel so well.  April can't miss work, so she brings her young daughter to the club, where the "house mother" of the dancers agrees to look after her.  

Even before I tell you about the troublesome customer that gets kicked out of the club for breaking the don't-touch-the-girls rule, even before I explain about the young Muslim man who visits the club to sample Western decadence, you know April's babysitting arrangement won't end well. 

And there you'll be, a lone light on in the house when the paper boy passes by and throws the morning edition on your front step.  

This is the most cow-patty-laden book I've ever vouched for here.  What else can we expect, when it's about strippers and the the sad horndogs that watch them?  You'll have to make your own decision about how much you'll tolerate.  But the story is also about humans trying to reach their dreams, or get a break from constant toil.  Somebody takes a shortcut they shouldn't take.  Somebody lets their temper get the best of them.  Somebody just wants a blue Slush Puppie and her own bed.  

And somebody (that's me) might be up late again tonight, gunning it all the way to page 535.  

Before I got all caught up in Dubus' book, I had time to cook:

CREAMY CHEDDAR TOMATO AND CHICKEN STEW

16 oz. boneless skinless chicken breast 

2 tsp salt 

1/2 tsp black pepper 

1 TB canola oil 

2 medium onions, chopped 

2 medium carrots, c

2 TB flour 

1 28-oz can whole peeled tomatoes 

1/4 cup tomato paste 

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper 

1 14.5-oz. can chicken broth 

2 1/2 cups grated white cheddar 

3 TB heavy cream 

1/2 baguette (8 oz.) halved crosswise and sliced

Cut up chicken. Season with salt and pepper. In a large pot or Dutch oven, heat oil over medium heat. Add chicken to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally until golden brown, about 8 minutes; remove and reserve. Add onions and carrots and cook until soft and beginning to brown, 7 min. Add garlic, flour, tomatoes, tomato paste and cayenne and cook, breaking up tomatoes with a spoon, 2 min. Whisk in broth, then add reserved chicken.

Bring to a simmer, cover and cook until chicken is very tender, 25 min. Stir in 1 1/2 cups cheese and cream until combined. Keep warm.

Before serving, place baguette slices on a baking sheet and sprinkle with remaining 1 cup cheddar. Broil until cheese melts, 2 min. Serve stew with toasts. Serves 8 at 395 cals. each. 

This recipe seemed like French country cooking at its best, a flavorful and warm supper on a nippy winter night.  It came in the now-defunct Ladies Home Journal that appears to be a gift subscription in my husband's name.  Perhaps his mother signed him up? 

I do love to ask him if he found the spring wardrobe hints useful, if he enjoyed the Diane Sawyer interview and if he picked up any tips from "Can This Marriage  Be Saved?" 

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