Between the pages

I’ve just begun Stalking the Wild Asparagus. It’s non-fiction and rather lengthy, so I think it will be a welcome break from all the short stories (with the exception of The Prestige) I’ve been reading lately. STWA has been sitting on my bookshelf long before Jen was raving about the foodie issue of the New Yorker* in which there was an article by John McPhee that mentioned Euell Gibbons.

Gibbons spent a lot of his life living off the land and in this book he recounts his adventures in food foraging (with a tiny section on hunting & fishing) and includes recipes. I’m excited about reading this book because I love the idea of living off the land. At least I can live vicariously through Gibbons. This book has gotten rave reviews online and I’m glad to see it back in print again and even more glad that I have a copy.

There are dozens of chapters; here’s a handful that caught my eye: Eat your chickory and drink it too, wild cranberries, A salute to the elderberry, The groundnut or Indian potato, Beating the pigs to the pigweeds, The common sunflower, and A wild winter garden in your cellar.

*I also came up with this, an abstract reprint from 1968 by MchPhee about Gibbons.

A brief bio on Gibbons can be found here

The 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th stories in The Knife Thrower, “The new automaton theater,” “The dream of the consortium,” “Paradise Park,” and “Beneath the cellars of our town” were my favorites because they are similar in style to his stories from the Barnum Museum and Little Kingdoms.

What I love most about BM and LK is that the stories are, for the most part, purely descriptive, sometimes without a plot, or if there was a plot, it was very subtle. The stories in BM and LK, as well as the four above that I adored, are very descriptive: they contain long rambling sentences containing carefully chosen words, and often the long sentences further stretch themselves out by containing commas, semicolons or dashes. Occasionally a particular short story is broken up with little chapter numbers or descriptive headers, The stories are so enchanting that you want the stories to be true; you want to see the places and peoples and things that Millhauser so carefully writes about.

Jason has dubbed this style “narrative,” but I’m not sure if this is the right term. Although I haven’t loved every story in TKT, it has been an interesting read because my theory is that TKT was one of his earlier published works and Millhauser had yet to refine and adopt the style of writing that I love so much and remember him for.

We get just a little bit of the country where we live. A couple of our neighbors have horses and in the back of our neighborhood is a big pond (sadly fenced off with a no trespassing sign) where geese frequent. We also see lots of bunnies and the occasional deer.

I am not a morning person, although I do make it to work on time, so Jason is in charge of walking Benjamin on workday mornings. Neither Jason or I are very technologically savvy, but we did manage to figure out how to operate Jason’s camera phone and e-mail pictures to me!

The best thing was getting to work this morning and checking my personal e-mail account. I was so surprised to see I had a e-mail from Jason’s phone with the picture below!  It seems Benjamin had an encounter with a pony (new to the pasture) and Jason snapped a picture and sent it to me. Benjamin and the horses love sniffing each other although they don’t know what to make of the kisses Benjamin tries to give them.

So a tree fell on my car over the weekend. Not the car I currently drive, the car that I rode until it coughed and sputtered and spewed black smoke in the air and died in the middle of an intersection while I was trying to make a left hand turn. Bless the 2 men, who were old enough to be my father, who helped me get the car out of the road. I don’t know if they were being good Samaritans, or they just wanted to get the heck home since my car died around 5:00pm.

My husband was antsy every time I drove that car off to work, wondering is this going to be the day I have to leave work early and rescue my wife? My husband is self-employed, so time is money. He also rarely worries, he leaves that up to me, since I do it so well. But when I called him and said today is the day the car died, I think he was secretly relieved. Now we only had to work out carpooling plans until we managed to get me a newer set of wheels.

Ah, I miss that car. I named the car ‘the Grinch’ due to its weird, pale, minty green color. I drove the heck out of it. How I know that a tree fell on it the over the weekend is, to make a long story short, because one of the men that my husband does a lot of work for bought the heap of junk (I say that lovingly now even though I dumped thousands of dollars into that car over its lifetime) for a couple of hundred bucks to make it look like someone was always home at his office.

But oh the memories of that car. My hubby (before we started dating) remembers seeing me driving downtown with Benjamin riding shotgun. There used to be a very cool bar downtown that would let me sit outside on the back patio and drink a beer and have Benjamin at my side. My hubby even saw us there on an occasion or two. And before that, after grad school, I drove all over the southeast on job interviews in that car only to accept an offer for where I lived and still live now. That car had some great stickers I plastered to it. My favorite one was ‘why be normal?’ but it featured a backwards ‘N.’

Then, sadly, my car finally sputtered its last breath during the spring of 2006. I drive a station wagon now which is pretty cool. When I first started to learn to drive I shared my mom’s station wagon. So I guess I’ve made a full circle…

I’ll try to get my hubby to take a picture with his camera phone and share the picture with y’all.

Okay so I don’t drink anymore.  At least for right now. I kinda got carried away with Lent and I don’t miss the wine too much.  I can still pony up to the bar and order a Shirley Temple, can’t I?

Anyway, I’m at work, wanting to be anywhere but here.  And as my mind wandered off from the task at hand, I got to thinking about who it would be fun to go out drinking with.  Share some drinks and nibbles and stories.

Feel free to add to my list, this is in no particular order:

Alton Brown

Jim Carrey

Wayne Brady

Andrew Zimmern

Anthony Bourdain

Steven Millhauser, of course, I’m such a groupie

Jean M Auel

Nina K (see link on my blogroll) or someone else as crazy creative as her

This Lemon Bar recipe came from an awesome cookbook that my best friend, Summer, gave me several years ago called Jim Fobel’s Old Fashioned Baking Book. I made this the other day for Mother’s Day.

Lemon Bars

crust: 1 cup flour, ¼ cup confectioner’s sugar, 6 TBS butter (chilled and cut into little pieces)

topping: 2 eggs, ¾ cup white sugar, ¼ fresh lemon juice from 2 large lemons, ½ tsp lemon zest, 2 TBS flour, pinch of salt, ¼ tsp baking powder

Preheat oven to 350°. Put flour and the confectioner’s sugar in a medium size bowl. Using a pastry blender, cut in the butter until the butter is the size of very small peas and is evenly distributed throughout the dry mixture. Pat into a 8×8 ungreased glass Pyrex dish. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes until light golden brown.

After the crust has been in the oven for at least 10 minutes, prepare the topping. You don’t want to prepare the topping too early because you don’t want add the baking powder until the last moment, then pour the topping over the crust, & pop it back in the oven.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs with an electric mixture until frothy and thick. Gradually add in the ¾ sugar. Add in the lemon juice and lemon zest and mix for another few minutes. Add the 2 TBS flour, pinch of salt, & ½ tsp baking powder and stir to incorporate. Pour over pre-baked crust and put back into the oven for 20 minutes.

Cool completely on a cooling rack for about 45 minutes before putting in the fridge to chill.

I love baking cookies from scratch, but I love eating them even more. One day, long ago, Jason was in a silly mood and sang me this little ditty based on the lyrics of Peter Tosh’s song about getting high. Jason doesn’t sing it often, but when he does, it’s a treat and makes me smile so big and I lightly bounce up and down while standing in place and joyfully sing along for the last line. I suppose all this silly behavior will come in handy whenever we have kids, but for now, Benjamin, our furry, four-legged child, finds it hilarious.

I eat 2 cookies in the morning, I eat 2 cookies at night.

I eat 2 cookies in the afternoon, they make me feel all right.

I eat 2 cookies in times of peace, and 2 in times of war.

I eat 2 cookies before I eat 2 cookies and then I eat 2 more!

This is totally going to be embroidered on a tea towel after I finish my gnome tea towel project. I will decorate the tea towel with embroidered cookies too! I am excited. This will be a large project and I’ll get use my transfer paper and stylus again. I’m also thinking the “pattern” will transfer much easier to my Aunt Martha tea towel as it’s texture is nice and smooth as compared to my tea towel from Sublime Stitching.