Let’s hear it for light reading! Escape the suspense of your own life with a girl detective novel, specifically Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham. My apologies to fans of the Veronica Mars TV series. I missed that show. If you already know her backstory, or if the series wrote it differently than the book, you may skip this paragraph. But [...]
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead is a story for those who love a rollicking book full of brothers and sisters. The reader will also need an appetite for some serious family dysfunction. Father Sam is the kind of dad who, if the fence needs painting, makes a party of it. But before long, the reader will notice that this tee-totaling, idea-spouting [...]
While planning this tasty twist on the grilled cheese sandwich, I discovered something handy at my local Kroger. The sandwich called for sharp cheddar and gouda. When I think "gouda," I think wheelbarrow-sized hunk of cheese wrapped in red rind. In my quiet little house, we'd never finish that up. You have to outrace the decay to which cheese is prone. We can't [...]
Aren't we supposed to read ourselves silly when we go on vacation? You'd think so, but I only fell further and further behind. I blame the eye-candy scenery out the car window. And the size of the book. Anyway, back at home, I'm catching up, plowing through the pages. And playing in the kitchen again. The weekend food around here includes Cheesy Tuna Mac [...]
It was the biggest Boy Scout trip ever. At the same time, it was the equivalent of shooting a manned rocket to the moon. It was the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, in Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis occupies center stage as the captain and, along with Thomas Jefferson, dreamer and planner of the voyage. Jefferson bought the continent-stretching piece of land then [...]
What a couple of weeks it has been! On the one hand, we have a few littered, shaken-up and burnt-out cities. On the other, I've heard people I know and respect demand that we say the right words or else. It's one thing to express an idea -- black lives matter, which means people are hurting, so let's help them. It's quite another to [...]
This Strawberry Cream Dessert dirtied a lot of bowls. However, I made it with the help of grandchildren, who not demonstrated great graham-cracker-smashing skills, but excellent bowl- and spatula-licking skills. We also fed some to a fellow whose only solid food so far has been strained carrots. It may be hard to go back to the carrots.
Hey folks, I just lost the draft of my post on Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. So let's just go with a few quotes: This book is about morality, about right and wrong. To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human [...]
When this pandemic began and we never knew what we might or might not find on the shelves, we coped emotionally around here by pulling out old favorite recipes, especially ones that used food we had on hand. Now that things have settled down a bit, we spend a lot of time in our new recipes, plotting what to make next. Here's the gem [...]
Adam Grant missed a huge opportunity. Four college students proposed a business idea to him, and Grant took a pass. His subsequent self-flagellating turned into a Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. I picked it up with more than a little reluctance. I don’t know how much originality I can tolerate. Say, some young lady wears combat boots with her prom gown. That’s original, [...]
