Awake at nine and a half-hour in bed with coffee and the still-with-us Boston Globe. Cat comes up for lovey time. Plunks herself down in mid-paper. How sweet it is.
Down to the kitchen and make blueberry pancakes out of yesterday's waffle batter. Two slices of bacon per person, our idea of dieting. It warn't turkey bacon, either.
Clean up kitchen, spot clean tablecloth and throw in a load of laundry. Monday is still washday.
Give Thisbe her insulin shot.
Onto computer for email, blogging, and working on today's reading for the writing group. Wrote 4 pages yesterday. Good for me.
Shower, etc.
Off to Walmart for cat litter, insulin needles, cat food and a few assorted groceries. I used to scorn Walmart, before retirement and the cats many needs.
Looking for rhubard for rhubard bread later in week. Hope it's not $5.99 per lb. again.
Drop off key for cat sitter with instructions.
Baking food processor bread, and freeform blueberry tart. Dinner is a salad with grilled steak (cooked last night) on top.
Watch a little Wimbleton.
Water houseplants.
Print out reading for tonight.
Wine and cheese, then dinner. La-de-dah!
Off to writing group.
Blueberry tart. Maybe a little reading or TV. Insulin to cat again.
Read more of Eat, Pray, Love on Kindle. Lights out!
Showing posts with label food processor bread. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food processor bread. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, October 31, 2008
Cat Blog Day Rolls Around Again
You were expecting to see cats in costumes, perchance? Fie!
Friday is cat blog day. The cats, Thisbe and Annie, have been adversarial lately, and when we came back from Long Island there were bits of fur all over the house, a sure sign of fighting. Of course the fights are always over in seconds.
Thisbe doesn't take kindly to bullying anymore, and gives as good as she gets. I notice that when they are having one of their confrontations (catfrontations in S.O.'s vocabulary) there is a lack of eye contact. One will look daggers and the other will be examining the ceiling, the chair, whatever there is to stare at without making eye contact with the enemy, so to speak.
Yesterday, for us, not the cats I made goulash soup, which is a cool weather fave, and always tasty. I had a pound of cheap thin steak. That and two onions, a green papper, garlic, canned tomatoes, carraway seeds, broth, and one teaspoon each hot, sweet and smoked paprika. Salt and pepper, natch. Most satisfying--not really spicy, but resonant. I added a potato and some chopped carrot, because we do like our veggies.
I made two loaves of bread, my food processor French bread, and it was not a walk in the park. Didn't add quite enough flour, and I had the stickiest, ickiest mess. Had to add more flour and knead it in. This is a no-knead bread, mind you. Sticky hands, sticky food processor, sticky counter--sticky everything. Yuck! Somehow I was able to form two loaves and they rose nicely, considering that I was afraid I also had the water too hot.
Bread is full of landmines. Into the oven it went, and it came out looking like, well, bread, with that wonderful smell. We attacked a loaf with the soup and ate most of the remainder this morning, leaving another loaf for the rest of today.
I really need (knead?) to branch out into other breads. Tonight we're grilling a pork tenderloin with a smoked paprika sauce. Yukon gold potatoes. Salad. Does that sound good or what?
Lately, I've been writing my novel, a speech, assignments for the food writing class, and soon, before Tuesday, an essay about why I am for Obama.
In the meantime, there are daffodils to plant as the weather should be good today. Frost on the pumpkin this morning.
Oh yes! Halloween. We have to carve the blasted expensive ($8.00) orange thing today. I bought candy at the Lindt outlet in Wrentham Mall yesterday. We had eaten the previous batch put aside for Halloween. Shameless, greedy, chocoholics that we are. Bad!
Boo!
Grapeshot
Thisbe doesn't take kindly to bullying anymore, and gives as good as she gets. I notice that when they are having one of their confrontations (catfrontations in S.O.'s vocabulary) there is a lack of eye contact. One will look daggers and the other will be examining the ceiling, the chair, whatever there is to stare at without making eye contact with the enemy, so to speak.
Yesterday, for us, not the cats I made goulash soup, which is a cool weather fave, and always tasty. I had a pound of cheap thin steak. That and two onions, a green papper, garlic, canned tomatoes, carraway seeds, broth, and one teaspoon each hot, sweet and smoked paprika. Salt and pepper, natch. Most satisfying--not really spicy, but resonant. I added a potato and some chopped carrot, because we do like our veggies.
I made two loaves of bread, my food processor French bread, and it was not a walk in the park. Didn't add quite enough flour, and I had the stickiest, ickiest mess. Had to add more flour and knead it in. This is a no-knead bread, mind you. Sticky hands, sticky food processor, sticky counter--sticky everything. Yuck! Somehow I was able to form two loaves and they rose nicely, considering that I was afraid I also had the water too hot.
Bread is full of landmines. Into the oven it went, and it came out looking like, well, bread, with that wonderful smell. We attacked a loaf with the soup and ate most of the remainder this morning, leaving another loaf for the rest of today.
I really need (knead?) to branch out into other breads. Tonight we're grilling a pork tenderloin with a smoked paprika sauce. Yukon gold potatoes. Salad. Does that sound good or what?
Lately, I've been writing my novel, a speech, assignments for the food writing class, and soon, before Tuesday, an essay about why I am for Obama.
In the meantime, there are daffodils to plant as the weather should be good today. Frost on the pumpkin this morning.
Oh yes! Halloween. We have to carve the blasted expensive ($8.00) orange thing today. I bought candy at the Lindt outlet in Wrentham Mall yesterday. We had eaten the previous batch put aside for Halloween. Shameless, greedy, chocoholics that we are. Bad!
Boo!
Grapeshot
Monday, June 04, 2007
Ladies Who Read
The wonderful sentence I mentioned in yesterday's blog is from a review of Summer Reading in Sunday's (6/3/07) New York Times Book Review. Anne Mendelson wrote the review. She is a freelance writer and editor.
"The clank of narrative machinery being hauled into place is rather too audible at the outset, before the three dovetailing plots take on a graceful momentum of their own."
It's really hard to begin a book. There are a gazillion rules - no backstory too early; no flashbacks too early; ditch the prologue; don't intoduce too many characters at once; make sure the reader knows what the book is "about" in the first few pages; stick in lots of reasonance, with appeals to all five senses; start with actions, not driving or on an airplane; don't begin with a cliched phone call. These are rules for genre fiction, at least mystery-suspense genre, and if you're fabulous, you can break the rules, but a beginning writer better not. So the"clank of narrative machinery," aka the setup, being hauled into place is often heard. I definitely see it in Promiscuous Mode and also in World of Mirrors. As long as it's not too 'pat,' one hopes the reader is enthused, because that is what tells her what the book will be about. Can't win for losing.
Apropos of seeing the name "Wolizer," I thought of a high school teacher of Spanish and English, Miss Walters. A spinster, as they were then called, she taught English and Spanish in a tiny town out west. She cared for an aging mother, which must have been why she got stuck there. No men suitable for a phi beta kappa English major within 90 miles. I remembered her as homely, but when I looked at the yearbook photo, she wasn't. I owe her an apology for thinking her dorky, for thinking of her as a loser, for thinking she was old and ugly. God, did she teach us to diagram the hell out of sentences, to do a bang-up job on a research paper. We laughed at her Castillian accent, which sounded so phoney among all the Latino Spanish. I can still hear her voice asking, "Quien falta?" Who's absent? So, sorry Miss Walters, wherever you are. You were a cool lady.
Today I print all 500+ pages (Courier 12) of World of Mirrors to send to the agent. It's not a question of will be like it, but will he think he can sell it? Maybe he has contacts in Germany. I wouldn't care where it was sold. It would be fun to do a signing in the cute bookstore on the island of Hiddensee, where there are a couple scenes in the book.
Now I will hie myself into the kichen to make the food processor bread. When we were newly weds, I used the word "hie" in a scrabble game and S.O. had never heard of it. Ha ha . Do YOU know it? I think my grandma used it.
With flour up to her elbows,
Grapeshot
"The clank of narrative machinery being hauled into place is rather too audible at the outset, before the three dovetailing plots take on a graceful momentum of their own."
It's really hard to begin a book. There are a gazillion rules - no backstory too early; no flashbacks too early; ditch the prologue; don't intoduce too many characters at once; make sure the reader knows what the book is "about" in the first few pages; stick in lots of reasonance, with appeals to all five senses; start with actions, not driving or on an airplane; don't begin with a cliched phone call. These are rules for genre fiction, at least mystery-suspense genre, and if you're fabulous, you can break the rules, but a beginning writer better not. So the"clank of narrative machinery," aka the setup, being hauled into place is often heard. I definitely see it in Promiscuous Mode and also in World of Mirrors. As long as it's not too 'pat,' one hopes the reader is enthused, because that is what tells her what the book will be about. Can't win for losing.
Apropos of seeing the name "Wolizer," I thought of a high school teacher of Spanish and English, Miss Walters. A spinster, as they were then called, she taught English and Spanish in a tiny town out west. She cared for an aging mother, which must have been why she got stuck there. No men suitable for a phi beta kappa English major within 90 miles. I remembered her as homely, but when I looked at the yearbook photo, she wasn't. I owe her an apology for thinking her dorky, for thinking of her as a loser, for thinking she was old and ugly. God, did she teach us to diagram the hell out of sentences, to do a bang-up job on a research paper. We laughed at her Castillian accent, which sounded so phoney among all the Latino Spanish. I can still hear her voice asking, "Quien falta?" Who's absent? So, sorry Miss Walters, wherever you are. You were a cool lady.
Today I print all 500+ pages (Courier 12) of World of Mirrors to send to the agent. It's not a question of will be like it, but will he think he can sell it? Maybe he has contacts in Germany. I wouldn't care where it was sold. It would be fun to do a signing in the cute bookstore on the island of Hiddensee, where there are a couple scenes in the book.
Now I will hie myself into the kichen to make the food processor bread. When we were newly weds, I used the word "hie" in a scrabble game and S.O. had never heard of it. Ha ha . Do YOU know it? I think my grandma used it.
With flour up to her elbows,
Grapeshot
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