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 [...]
Since mac 'n cheese is such a necessary food, it doesn't hurt to have a few favorite versions of it. Mac 'n Cheese Henwood Style would make it into my top three. The recipe calls for three different cheeses, including bleu. I know some people aren't fan of bleu cheese, but in this dish, it seems to sharpen the flavor without revealing [...]
I’ll bet you have never thought about what your life would be like without the Port of Los Angeles. Bill Sharpsteen helps you imagine the worst — empty shelves at Target and Dollar General, an empty floor at Kittle’s Furnitures, an empty lot at your Toyota dealer — in his engrossing book, The Docks. You know what a shipping container is, don’t you? No doubt [...]
Louis Sachar loves the game of bridge. When he decided to write a novel about bridge-players, “My publisher, my editor, my wife and my agent all said I was crazy. ‘No one’s going to want to read a book about bridge!’ they told me on more than one occasion.” Add me to that list. I gave Sachar’s The Card Turner a good try. You would [...]
I’ve been waiting a long time to get my hands on this week’s book, Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt, in which Laxalt writes a memoir of his Basque father. The Basques, as we knew them in my childhood, were a people that came to America from their old homeland on the border between Spain and France. Their surnames were a mouthful of syllables and [...]
