Cranberry Scones

I love to bake.  Unfortunately, I love to eat what I bake, so I don't bake that often.  My mother was a terrific baker.  She understood how comforting food could be.  If someone had a birthday or was recovering from an illness, she'd bake them their favorite pie or cake or cookies.  She spoiled me for delicious home-baked goodies.

I had some non-dairy cream left over from a dinner recipe and I didn't want to waste it.  I remembered that this recipe used cream, so I dug out some frozen cranberries and about an hour later, I had warm cranberry scones.

I don't remember where I found this recipe.  I thought the copy was large enough to read, but it looks sort of small here.  If you can't read it, let me know and I'll send you a larger copy via e-mail.  You can use the recipe as written, but I'm a vegan, so I use non-dairy coconut creamer and Earth Balance instead of butter.  Earth Balance even comes in sticks, which are easier for baking.  Both are delicious  substitutes for cream and butter.  I defy anyone to taste the difference.

  

Murder in Pigalle - Cara Black

I've been reading this series for several years now.  I started reading it because it takes place in Paris,  the main characters are Aimee Leduc and Rene Friant, a dwarf, and because the scattered French words give me a chance to pretend I'm still fairly fluent in French.  I spent a week in Paris many years ago and I remember enough about it to occasionally picture where the action takes place.  From book to book, the crimes move from one arrondissement to another.  There's always a map in the front.

Aimee and Rene run a computer security business together, but Aimee is always finding her way into real life crime.  Rene often bails her out, often with the help of Saj, another computer expert.  I like both Rene and Saj better than I like Aimee.

In this episode, Aimee is pregnant.  The father is her on-again-off-again boyfriend whose priorities are his ex-wife and daughter.  The daughter is in a coma and the ex-wife is needy.  Aimee hasn't told him that she's pregnant.  She knows that she needs more than he will give her.

In the midst of all this (and a broiling hot summer, too), Zazie, her friend's daughter and Aimee's protege, disappears.  (Please note that she didn't 'go missing' in this review.  We used to say 'disappear', which is a perfectly good word, but it seems to have 'gone missing' from our vocabulary.) Because there have been several rapes of young girls in the area, Aimee is concerned that Zazie is a victim of the rapist.  Zazie doesn't fit the profile of 12 years old, blonde, and violin-playing, but Aimee is convinced Zazie has been taken by the rapist.  And she's wrong.

I like the details of everyday life in Paris.  I wish there were bakeries on every corner in my city.  I love good fresh bread.  But I'm glad I don't live in a gorgeous freezing-in-the-winter and melting-in-the-summer apartment where the elevator is often broken.

Aimee gets a little tiresome sometimes.  Her Chanel red lipstick, her designer clothes, even if they're from thrift stores, her constantly feeding her little dog horse meat from the butcher.  She's always scaling buildings or jumping from roofs.  She puts herself and others in danger because she's impulsive and jumps to conclusions.  I'll give her one more book and then I think I've had enough.  Then again, I wonder how she's going to fit a baby into her life.

The Unspeakable - Meghan Daum

      

This was a hot book at my library.  The hold list was longer than for most books I request.  I don't remember where I read about it, but it was touted as a no holds barred collection of essays.  I'm not sure it lived up to being outrageous.  I agreed with a lot of what Daum had to say, but maybe that's the point:  she admits to feelings that many of us have and are afraid to voice.

Grieving is one of those feelings.  In the first essay, the author writes about her relationship with her mother and her mother's death.  Many people feel that grieving should take certain forms and adhere to an accepted time table.  Oddly, I'm taking an on-line free course on Hamlet, and part of that discussion is about whether or not Hamlet was crazy, suffering from melancholy, or if he just grieved longer and louder than was the norm in those days.  He was expected to buck up and get on with it, but he didn't.

Her essay about dogs was wonderful.  We were definitely on the same page with that one.  I start to cry every time I read The Rainbow Bridge or hear it referenced.  If you've ever lost a beloved pet, you probably know it.  I think one of the reasons I suffer from sustained depression / melancholy is that in the past eight years, I've held six beloved pets in my arms as I allowed them to leave me and their pain and suffering.

I couldn't relate to her essay about being an honorary, if inactive, member of the LGBT community.  Totally lost me there.  I have no problem with people of any sexual inclination (as long as they don't involve unwilling participants, human or animal), but I also have no desire to be part of any of those communities.  I don't want to be part of almost any communities, even those to which I'm legitimately entitled, and I don't like groups.  But hers is an interesting viewpoint.

We also agree about children, although I never even considered having one.  I think children should be wanted with all one's heart, not just conceived because 'it's time' or one's worried that one will regret not having one, or, horrors of horrors, that a child will save a marriage.  I like kids if they are  smart, communicative, imaginative, and don't jump on the furniture or color on the walls.  They had better not be mean to animals.  I cut animals more slack than I do children.  Animals are allowed to bite or scratch children, but not vice versa.

There's an essay on Joni Mitchell, one of the author's idols, and the dinner that the author had with her.  Not What It Used to Be is about how things have changed over the years.  The author's almost twenty years younger than I am, so I've got more stories than she does.  The Best Possible Experience is about the pressure to marry, to 'settle', and to hold out for the right one.  It's also a defense of unmarried people.  Even though Daum did marry in her mid-thirties, marriage wasn't anywhere near  the top of her 'to do' list.

Daum hates to cook and views food as something to get done.  She has no aptitude for cooking, usually screws up recipes by not using the correct pans or reading the recipe through before starting.  She's perfectly happy with almost anything that someone else cooks.  Her husband seems to be the one who keeps them alive.

Invisible City is about life in Los Angeles, where the author lives.  She rubs elbows with celebrities and has some funny stories about those encounters.  And some sad stories about them and the world they live in.  They are not like us.

I skipped the last essay, which was about her near death experience with a sudden and badly behaved bacterial infection.  Since my husband spent several days in the hospital last fall with sepsis, this one was a little too soon and too close to home.  I had no desire to relive days in the hospital spent waiting and hoping and trying to stay strong.  I don't watch shows about or read books about hospitals or doctors or anything involving sickness.  It's too much like real life.

I think I've given you an idea of the content.  It's varied and most of it's interesting.  Daum writes well and writes honestly.  The Unspeakable was a pleasure to read.

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust - Alan Bradley

                   

       

I finally finished a book!  I finished four in January, a paltry amount for me.  I've been struggling with a post holiday / mid winter slump.  I think things are looking up.  The amaryllis my cousin gave me for Christmas, eight orange-red blooms, is lifting my heart. 

Sometimes it's the little things:

                                                                        Dust of Snow
                                                                       by Robert Frost

                                                                      The way a crow 
                                                                     Shook down on me 
                                                                       The dust of snow 
                                                                     From a hemlock tree

                                                                      Has given my heart 
                                                                      A change of mood 
                                                                    And saved some part 
                                                                     Of a day I had rued. 

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust has also helped me climb out of the abyss.  It's not a short book, almost 400 pages, but it's a fast read.

Some reviewers haven't liked this Flavia de Luce book because it takes place at a boarding school in Canada and not in Flavia's crumbling home in England.  That didn't bother me at all.  I'm more interested in Flavia than I am in her home or her family.  I did miss Dogger, though.

Flavia has been shipped off to the boarding school her mother went to.  It's also a training ground for members of the ultra secret and (to me at least) mysterious organization headed by her Aunt Felicity.  It's so secret that no one knows who's in it and I'm not clear on what their mission is.  Maybe I missed something in a previous book.

That doesn't detract from the murder that Flavia finds herself solving.  Her first night at the school,  she's attacked in her room by a fellow student  -  and a body falls down the chimney.  It ain't Santa Claus.  It's been up the chimney for a while.  The head that rolls off the body is a mummy's head, but the body is thousands of years younger.

Flavia must find out whose body it is, how it got there, why the person was killed, and who the killer is.  Just when she thinks she knows all, she realizes she doesn't.  

I enjoyed As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust and will look forward to the next Flavia book.

Woodmere Art Museum / Walter Elmer Schofield

                                                              
                                                                         

Thursday, Jack and I went to the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, PA, about a half and hour northwest of Philadelphia.  They have an exhibit of paintings by Pennsylvania-born impressionist Walter Elmer Schofield.  I've only seen his paintings on television or in magazines, but I like them.

Because this is a small museum, I wasn't really expecting much.  Goodness, was I overwhelmed!  They had about thirty or forty of his paintings!  He painted in Pennsylvania, Great Britain, and France.  I apologize, but I didn't expect to be able to take photos at the museum, so I didn't take my camera.  Jack took some photos of another exhibit with his cell phone, but I was so engrossed in the Schofield paintings that I forgot to ask him to take photos of them.  I hope you can see some of them here.  This exhibit closes on January 25th or 26th, so if you're in the area and you want to see it, go now.

They had just installed an exhibit that I thought was creative and fun.  It's a great way to introduce kids to good art.  Do you know the song / rhyme 'I Know and Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly'?  If you don't know the rhyme / song, you should be able to read it / listen to it here.  This was a favorite song of mine when I was little.  A silly song.  The museum has illustrated the song with paintings from their collection.  Remember, these photos were taken with an I-phone, which the museum encouraged as long as you don't use the flash.

Here are two photos of permanent exhibits at the museum:  a doll house and a portrait of Charles Knox Smith, the founder, over the fireplace decorated for Christmas.  The photo of the lovely Christmas tree didn't come out well, but it was decorated with bows and little ornaments.  Very pretty.

Here are some photos of the 'I Know an Old Woman' exhibit:

And just to wrap things up, here's a painting done of a harbor on the Delaware River in the area that used to be called Southwark, a.k.a. Queen Village, where we live, and Pennsport.  I wish it still looked like this!

The New Year is Starting Slowly - Or I Am Anyway

I'm still trying to drag myself out of the holiday blues and regain my normal schedule.

Reading has been slow.  I've started books but can't seem to stay engaged.  I'm sure it's me, not them.  I'm a little depressed to find that I read about eleven fewer books last year than I did in 2013.  There were a few personal problems last year that made finding time to read and concentrating on reading  difficult.

Since 1968, I've been keeping sporadic track of the books I've read.  Sporadic in the earlier years but compulsive for many years.  I use 3 x 5 cards and file them in a lovely old oak double file drawer.  I decided that I didn't have enough to do with my spare time, so I logged all those cards into a program I created on my lap top.  Now I can sort them by author, title, or date I finished reading them.  And they're all on my lap top, so when someone blogs about a book, I can just open my program and check to see if I've read it.  (Yeah, I bet you remember all the books you've read, right?!)

I hate the holidays for many reasons.  Mostly because my late mother was the spirit of Christmas and since we lost her to dementia and to death fifteen years ago, Christmas hasn't been the same.  I don't miss her less, I miss her more.  But we have three little girls in the family, my grandnieces, two 2-year-olds and one 4-year-old, who made this past Christmas more fun.  They're lovely and smart and thoughtful and funny.

Jack has become obsessed with the jigsaw puzzle my sister gave him for Christmas.  I think she's trying to drive him insane.  The puzzle is a borderless poinsettia, that is, the border is the leaves of the plant.  There are no 'edge' pieces like in a regular square or rectangular puzzle.  But bless his little manic soul, he's determined it's not going to get the best of him!  It would be nice to eat at the dining room table again, though.

The two books I've finished so far this year are The Curious Affair of the Third Dog by Patricia Moyes and Die Again by Tess Gerritsen.  Of the two, I liked the second much better.  The first was slow going.  I also decided I don't like mysteries in which the author spends the last five or ten pages explaining what happened.  I want to know what happened by the time I get to the end of the book.  The Tess Gerritsen book was an exciting, fast read, as most of the Rizzoli and Isles books are.  (God save us from that awful television series!)  I needed something like that to help kick me out of my reading slump.

That may or may not be working since I'm currently reading about five books and although I'm enjoying all of them, I don't feel compelled to get back to any of them.  That's not the way I like to read.  There are still a lot of year-end things to do, especially since Jack and I are self-employed.  There are estimated taxes to pay, files to sort out for the accountant, new file folders to make  -  fun stuff, but someone (me) has to do them.

Jack has helpfully pointed out that even though we may retire this year, I, as the business partner / housewife, will still have all the same chores and duties in my role as the housewife.  I hope what he meant to say was that after he retires completely, he'll have more time to learn how to do laundry, fold it properly, and help with the cleaning (which he currently does sporadically).  He'll do most of the cooking, I hope, but he can't buy groceries because other people in the stores drive him mad.  It's best to keep him away form grocery stores unless I can find one that's open 24 hours a day and he can go in the middle of the night.

Turtle, our cat, is correct.  It is now 5:00PM and she's entitled to her dinner.  So, I'll leave you puzzling over this post and hope to have something more interesting to write about soon.

Happy New Year!

                                                                             

Wishing all my blogging and blog reading friends the happiest and healthiest New Year!