My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a story, told in the first person, about Lucy Barton remembrance of her life as she lies in a hospital bed recuperating from an illness. She obviously had a lonely, tough, even terrible, childhood with cold parents. Like …
This is my second of three short recipe posts.We love oatmeal in the winter; I imagine we eat it at least 5 times a week from December through February. And each December we remember we customized the process and puzzle over how we made it the year before. To minimize effort and cleanup we use our …
January 16, 2016 I have a few short recipe posts in the bullpen I’ll be posting over the next week or two. Last week I made mushroom risotto that called for miso paste. I found myself with some left over miso and wondered what to do with it. Miso soup came to mind but then …
How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation by John Dominic Crossan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Justice v Judgement Justice v Judgement I am a Christian; however, I have struggled most of my adult life with the dichotomy of God as described in …
January 13 A week or so ago Carla asked me “Could you make something vegetarian once in a while?” My eyes bugged out, then glazed over and I broke out in a cold sweat. “Can I at least use chicken stock?” I asked. “Oh, sure – your chicken stock is great.” Phew. I thought and …
January 8-9, 2016 For the past couple of months we’ve had the kind of weather the rest of the country thinks we normally have. Lots and lots of rain and plenty of gray skies. The past weekend looked promising and we wanted to get out of the house so we took a mini vacation to …
January 7, 2015 Chicken Tortilla Soup is one of those dishes where I keep searching for a better recipe. I’ve cooked it many times and have always come away with something tasty. Nevertheless I’m always looking for something else. In January 2012 I wrote about an incredibly easy recipe featuring a store bought rotisserie chicken …
In 2013 and 2014 I read on the bus and finished 28 and 33 books, respectively. Reading looked to be a casualty in my first year of retirement; I had so many interests I found it difficult to find time to sit down and read. In February I finished a book I had started at …
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon My rating: 3 of 5 stars I came across this book when listening to the WTF podcast where Marc Maron interview Paul Thomas Anderson about his film adaptation. I’ve been trying to expand my reading horizons so I jumped in. Pynchon uses the Private Investigator genre to explore the culture …
January 1, 2016 Eating beans and rice on New Year’s Day is said to bring good luck. My buddy Dudley always cooks up some black-eyed peas on New Years. I don’t know about the luck, but cooking up a pot of red beans and rice is a tradition at our house. I’ve blogged this recipe …