The purpose of teenage children, at least in our family, was to go out and find a part-time job, then entertain us around the dinner table with their work stories. One daughter waited tables at a pizza parlor. This was an authentic pizza joint, mind you. The owners put their fingers together and shook them, just like you see in the movies. And this [...]
Come with me and we’ll escape into a world that is no more, but must have been lovely while it lasted. We’ll see it through the eyes of Carol Buckley who, in At the Still Point, remembers life as the youngest of ten children in a family of notables and achievers. Daddy Buckley had a golden thumb. With his money, he housed his large [...]
Single woman inherits house in picturesque setting. Also, meets a guy. A Hallmark movie expert whom I know well says they all launch just like Tabitha King’s novel, Pearl. If only I watched Hallmark, I’d know these things. As it is, I catch snippets of the fall-in-love sagas as I pass through my house, distributing the mail or hunting for candy. The thing about [...]
Minutes from now, I'll be in the kitchen, finishing up what's left of this Jiffy Jambalaya. Let me just say that I'll be sad to see it go. But it's a quick dish to make, so I could rustle up more with hardly any trouble. It will require a green pepper, which reminds me: who's having trouble opening the plastic produce [...]
“Old boy, you’ve got forty-eight hours,” says the physician to the protagonist of Muriel Barbery’s slim novel Gourmet Rhapsody. The patient is a famous food critic. “I have, for all eternity, pinned to my list of discoveries some of the most prestigious butterflies among practicing chefs.” This was a guy who could make you or break you, and now he lies in his bed, [...]
So, who remembers their high school history textbook? Chances are, if you attended between 1980 and today, you studied Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Writers of Zinn’s era approached history in a new way, concentrating less on kings, presidents, and tycoons and more on the guy on the assembly line, the waitress, the cancer patient, all the people affected by [...]
I love crepes! I love Nutella! I love whipped cream, although it's more of a supporting actor in this yummy Nutella Crepe Cake. This project was not hard at all. Crepe-making is easy, if time-consuming. Otherwise, I didn't work any harder than mixing together creamy good things. I nabbed the recipe from www.sweetenquick.com, a now-inactive website. Nutella Crepe Cake 24 to 28 crepes [...]
In the opening pages of Donna Tartt’s Little Friend, a Mississippi family gathers for a Mother’s Day feast and, before Mama can find "the good napkins," one of the children dies in a horrible accident. The story picks up again when Harriet, an infant at the time of the tragedy, is just old enough to ride her bike around town unaccompanied. And she’s mighty [...]
At dinner tonight, my son-in-law asked how I know a recipe is a keeper. "Even when it is," my daughter told him, "that doesn't mean we'll ever see it again." That's what life is like when your mother loves to try new recipes. However, by family vote, we ate an old favorite tonight: homemade Snickers. The whole project was made more interesting with little [...]
This week, we turn our attention to Stuffocation, in which author James Wallman calls out to the reader buried under too many possessions. Wallman wrote what amounts to an excellent magazine article. But if one repeats one’s useful ideas enough times, one can stretch an idea up to book-length and take up your entire week. In fact, the reading experience resembled a cab ride [...]
