#31 Reading

I picked this book up to read on our August trip to New York, and never ended up getting to it, so I tried it again last week. It's not a book I would normally choose for myself--I usually lean towards mysteries rather than bestsellers. (I particularly avoid bestsellers with the word "romantic" in the description.) But, it had good reviews, and I ended up liking it quite a bit. The main character is a 93-year-old man who is thinking back seventy years to the time he joined the circus as a vet during the Depression. His stories about circus life and the time period really held my interest, even though some of the descriptions of his romantic interludes were pretty cheesy. The book has an interview with the author & book club discussion questions at the end, but I can't see myself recommending it to my book club because I don't think the story lends itself to a lot of discussion. Still, I enjoy a well-told story.

Here's the book description from Publisher's Weekly:

The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures. He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clichéd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.

Weekend Dinner

I'm not counting last night's dinner towards my goal, since I'm working towards cooking dinner during the week consistently. But I did make dinner last night, and wanted to record it in case I make it again.

I found a recipe in Real Simple (November Issue) for Cheese Ravioli with Toasted Walnuts. According to the magazine, the total time/hands-on time was only 20 minutes, so I thought I'd give it a test run in case it could become a quick weeknight favorite. Here's the original recipe from the magazine:

Cheese Ravioli with Toasted Walnuts
1 14- to 16-ounce package cheese ravioli (frozen or fresh)
1/3 cup olive oil
1/4 cup (2 ounces) walnuts, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, sliced
2 teaspoons lemon juice
Kosher Salt & Pepper
1/2 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1/4 cup grated parmesan

Cook the ravioli according to package directions. Drain, reserving 3 tablespoons of the cooking water.

Heat the oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the walnuts & garlic. Cook, stirring, until the nuts are lightly toasted and fragrant, about 5 minutes.

Stir in the lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper, parsley & the reserved cooking water.

Add the ravioli and toss to coat.

Divide among individual plates and sprinkle with the parmesan.

I found fresh beef & parmesan ravioli at the store, so I decided to use that, instead. And I like basil better than parsley, so I used fresh basil, and added it at the end (during the toss to coat portion of the directions). Since the ravioli had parmesan in it, I decided to go with mozzarella for the cheese. I wasn't very impressed by how it turned out. K really liked it, but I thought there was too much olive oil, which made it seem greasy. The store-bought ravioli didn't have a very strong parmesan flavor, and mozzarella doesn't have a very strong flavor, so I mainly tasted basil. I do love basil, but overall the dish was just ehh.

#9: Weeknight Dinner

Last night I made an old favorite for dinner that I adapted from the cookbook Mad At Martha. Despite my lack of time for weeknight cooking--and general laziness--I do love cookbooks. Mad At Martha was a Christmas gift from a friend who met the authors at a book signing.

K has been talking about sweet treats this week, so I decided last night would also be a good time to try out the "Balls of Goodness" I'd been drooling over on another nestie's food blog. Mmm, they were as tasty as they look on MrsFroggiana's Blog! Mine weren't as pretty as hers, and I was rushing to get dinner on the table after starting late, so no photos of cranberry chicken or oreo truffles here. K liked them so much that he managed to gulp several down, even after proclaiming he was stuffed from dinner. And I happen to know he ate at least two of them for breakfast this morning!

Cranberry Chicken
1 lb of chicken breasts
1/4 cup butter (half a stick)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 cup italian bread crumbs
1 can whole berry cranberry sauce

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt the butter in the microwave while you pound the chicken flat. (I set each chicken breast on a piece of foil, covered it with saran wrap, and pounded away.) Mix butter & vinegar, soak each chicken breast in mixture before dragging it through bread crumbs. Scoop a mound of cranberry sauce into the center of each chicken, then roll the chicken up and secure with a toothpick. Place each roll in a cooking-spray coated baking dish. Drizzle leftover butter/vinegar mixture & cran juice from can over chicken rolls. Cook 45 minutes.

Note: The original recipe calls for 1/2 cup of butter and no balsamic vinegar. 1/2 cup of butter doesn't sound like a lot, but I balked at using an entire stick. I remembered seeing a dessert recipe for berries that called for balsamic vinegar, so I thought that would be a good way to bring out the tartness of the cranberries in this recipe. Since I haven't made the dish using the original recipe, I can't say whether it's very different, but we certainly think this is delicious.

#4 Nephew Time

One of my nephews is a very good sport.

My dad's birthday is 3 days after mine, so we usually have a combined celebration with the family. This year, it was lunch a week after our birthdays--he spent his birthday sick in bed with a cough & sore throat. My family kept asking what I wanted for my birthday, but there isn't any stuff I really wanted. I just wanted to spend time with everyone, enjoying ourselves. And what better way to enjoy ourselves than with fake moustaches?

I bought the moustaches a couple of months ago, thinking K would get a laugh out of them. (And needing a few bucks to add to my amazon.com order to get me past the free shipping threshold.) He thought they were more creepy than funny. Understandable, especially when I was wearing one. But the idea of my family in moustaches? Hilarious!

Mom & Dad were ready to sign up as soon as I told them. Well. . .my mom shares my sense of humor, and my dad goes along with things. But I knew nephew #1 (N1) would be a tough sell--he's two (30 months, actually) and he's in a phase of hating costumes and masks and, really, wearing anything that doesn't specifically belong to him. My mom had bought one of those glasses/fake moustache/bushy eyebrows combo things, and he told her to take it off because it wasn't funny. I thought I'd be able to convince him to wear just a moustache, but no such luck. My brother and SIL both tried to win him over (wearing their moustaches), but he would have nothing to do with the moustache.

His little brother, however, was an easier mark. Nephew #2 (N2--nine months old) is such a happy, easy-going little fella, that I thought he would be a good moustache candidate. . .as long as he didn't try to eat it! He was hilarious as soon as S put it on him. He kept wanting to pet the moustache with one finger, which led to some very funny photos. Of course, all of the pictures of Family Moustache Day are funny--it cracks me up to see the different expressions we all made while wearing the moustaches, and how similar our expressions were. I wonder how we'll spice up our family birthday celebration next year?

#21 Pantry: Done!

My official start date for my 73 in 730 was my birthday, October 19th. Part of my birthday fun that weekend was cleaning out the pantry with K. Yep, we were truly partying like rock stars that day.

I wish I had thought to take before pictures, but instead I can just remember the back half of the closet full of paper bags & boxes, the shelves overflowing with outdated cans, pasta and assorted non-necessities. We had to throw out pasta that K had moved in from his duplex three years ago. He'd also been hanging on to a bag of hot chocolate packets since his apartment--the place he lived when I met him practically ten years ago. Bleah! I don't think I've ever even had hot chocolate since we've met. . .and yet, he wanted to keep some of the hot chocolate. If he hasn't had any in the next six months, we agreed that I could throw it out. Like he'd even notice!

We bought some bins from the Container Store to help collect similar items--K insisted on open, clear bins. I think we ended up with seven or eight bins, total. I've been so spoiled with this enormous pantry, I just hope we can find another big walk-in when we move.

#31 Reading

This weekend I finished reading The World To Come, which was one of my book club selections. Actually, it was a selection that I suggested, thinking it would be a fun detective story with some art history. I was so wrong!

Here's the description from amazon:

Following in the footsteps of her breakout debut In the Image, Dara Horn's second novel, The World to Come, is an intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, the New Jersey-based Ziskind family, and the "already-weres" and "not-yets" who roam an eternal world that exists outside the boundaries of life on earth.
At the center of the story is Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy who now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister Sara forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was wrongfully taken from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists his twin to create a forgery to replace the stolen Chagall. What follows is a series of interwoven stories that trace the life and times of the famous painting, and the fate of those who come into contact with it.
From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn takes readers on an amazing journey through the sacred and the profane elements of the human condition. It is this expertly rendered juxtaposition of the spiritual with the secular that makes The World to Come so profound, and so compelling to readers. As we learn near the end of the beautiful tale, "The real world to come is down below--the world, in the future, as you create it." --Gisele Toueg

The second chapter of the book is told from the perspective of a boy who has been orphaned during the Russian Pogroms of 1919, and I nearly had to put the book down and stop reading during that chapter. The descriptions of this child's experiences when he loses his parents and lives in an orphanage are terrifying. I am glad I stuck it out through the book, though, because I learned about a time in history I had no idea had ever happened. I didn't like the ending, but I did like several of the chapters towards the end of the book.

#9: Chili Dinner

I'd bought two pounds of lean ground beef over the weekend to make chili this week. Of course the day that ended up working best was yesterday--Halloween and 80+ degrees during the day. But I was able to get home early, and immediately got to work on dinner. My chili recipe is so incredibly easy--but delicious. Plus, it only took me about 20 minutes, and that was including answering the door a few times for trick or treaters.

I usually keep packets of McCormick's chili seasoning in our spice cabinet. It used to come in mild & hot flavors, but on Sunday I was only able to find original & hot, so I bought original. I bought about two pounds of ground beef, thinking that I would freeze the leftovers after today for an even easier dinner some other night. I cooked the meat, added the spices & about 1/2 cup of water (per pound) and let the water cook off. Then, the secret ingredient--salsa! The spice packet suggested adding a can of crushed tomatoes, but K usually has some salsa around for snacking, and I think that gives even more flavor. If we don't have any salsa, I use a can of Rotel. We don't like beans in our chili, so after everything is stirred up and simmered for 10 or so minutes, it's good to go. K put his on a soft roll like a sloppy joe, but I ate mine from a bowl with shredded cheddar.

On the side: I had a package of frozen veggies that I steamed. I've got to take baby steps on the side dishes--usually the most I can ever get together is a salad, or a veggie from a can. We're trying to eat more vegetables, so I bought a few packages of mixed frozed veggies that can be steamed in their own bag. I like to sprinkle them with mixed spices, depending on what else we're eating.