April 2011
24 posts
this will be happening
Apple Cheese Soup
- 1 cup grated apple
- ¼ cup chopped onion
- 4 tbsp. butter
- ¼ cup flour
- 2 ½ cups milk
- 2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
- ¼ tsp. salt
- ½ tsp. nutmeg
- ½ bottle Woodchuck Hard Cider
In saucepan, cook apples and onions in butter until tender. Add flour and blend until smooth. Stir in milk and Woodchuck Hard Cider. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally until mixture thickens. Add cheese and seasonings. Stir as they melt. Garnish with a dash of nutmeg.
Watching the royal wedding at work, because, honestly, what is there better to do at 7 am on a Friday morning, and let me just say: THE HATS.
I found myself yelling at the rats and kicking a cabinet
Moving in just over two weeks. Blerg.
“For years, I’ve found it hard to talk about Mortenson’s books. They often come up in conversation, because I’m a former Peace Corps teacher who lived in Asia for more than a decade. And yet that experience made me wary of any simple narrative that involves an American helping people overseas. Like many volunteers, I often felt overwhelmed and ineffective; it took two years of diligent study just to gain a decent facility with the Chinese language. I was still making cultural mistakes up until the day I left. If anything, I felt most positive about the Peace Corps experience because my impact was limited—I left without building anything, or changing the culture, or revolutionizing classroom patterns in my school. I always viewed it as an exchange: there was some value to my teaching, and in the meantime I learned a great deal from my students, colleagues, and friends. It seemed a tiny part of an incremental, long-term process, as China engaged with the outside world. And the key element was that the Chinese remained in charge—it was up to them to improve their country.”
—
Peter Hessler, “What Mortenson Got Wrong” [The New Yorker]
Hessler’s story of his Peace Corps experience, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, was one of my first and favorite travel narratives. He brings a similar thoughtfulness to his essay on Mortenson’s alleged misdoings.
grimm family beer bread
Note: This is J’s favorite. I make it with a stick (eep!) of salted butter, and, lately, tragically flat homebrew cider substituted for the beer. Once I added nuts, too — when I asked Daddy whether I should go with walnuts or pecans, he answered, “Pecans. You’re a Southerner.”
Good reminder.
My dad is — to put it lightly — an absolutely bad-ass baker. His specialty? Bread. For as long as I can remember, every Sunday he would spend hours crafting the dinner we’d share that night. Often he’d lay coal bricks in the grill or stuff potatoes with three types of dairy and bacon. But without fail, he would always make bread. Two loaves, and a different variety each week. One loaf would belong to us, the family, and the other was up for grabs. It could go to a neighbor or a friend who was over or as my sister Katt and I got older, boyfriends’ families.
Even though Poppy’s expert culinary instincts haven’t exactly been passed along to either of his spawn, he is always willing to help us out. In an effort to assist us in impressing our friends with a secretly fool-proof, few-ingredient recipe, he shared with us one formula I continue to manipulate most times I try it. One of the best parts is you are likely to already have all of these ingredients ready to become edible in your kitchen right now.
beyond bunnies: the real meaning of Easter →
npr.org
Anne Lamott on All Things Considered.
Perks of Being a Wallflower casting updates →
blogs.indiewire.com
Is 1991 old enough to feel retro to today’s teens? I suppose most of them weren’t born then(!). Anyway, I’m excited about Emma Watson, Mae Whitman (Parenthood and Arrested Development, whatwhat!), and Paul Rudd. I might have to reread Perks, though, since I last read it roughly a decade ago…
“In the face of it, this is a curious turn of events. Whatever you want to say about Christianity as a system of thought or a force in history, you’ll have to admit that it has a pretty impressive record as a source of inspiration for artists and writers. But when we use the buzzword ‘Christian’ in contemporary American society, we’re talking about a distinctively modern cultural and demographic phenomenon that has almost no connection to the spiritual and intellectual tradition that fueled Dante and Milton and Leonardo and Bach.”
—
— “Why Are Christian Movies So Awful?” [via Salon]
Something J and I asked ourselves after the latest, awful-est Chronicles of Narnia film. I haven’t seen most of the stuff O’Hehir mentions, but then, I also wouldn’t classify myself as an Evangelical Christian, the subject of his column.
“If we begin listening for these kinds of comments, we will discover that attempting to control the way others think of us is one of the primary uses we put words to in contemporary society. Human conversation is largely an endless attempt to convince others that we are more assertive or clever or gentle or successful than they might think if we did not carefully educate them.”
—
from my current 2011 forerunner in the competition for most embarrassing book to read at the reception desk, The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortenberg
[Still, it’s really very good, and I’m grateful to the Baptists for making our growth group read it this Lent.]
“The problem is not vocabulary, though critics will point out words like ‘consubstantial,’” Father Ruff said in an interview. “The problem is syntax and word order. The sentences are too complicated, the pronouns are so far away from their antecedent you can’t even tell what the pronoun refers to.”
—
“For New Mass, Closer to Latin, Critics Voice a Plain Objection” [NYTimes, via my awesome dad]
This is absolutely my issue with the liturgy we use at our Anglican church, too. Blerg.
#12: Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
Nailer is a teen living on the post-apocalyptic Gulf Coast, stripping oil ships in a bleak imagined future ravaged by climate change. Or that’s his life until a hurricane washes up the rich girl who could change everything.
Ship Breaker was a tough read, emotionally. I struggled to really figure out who the intended readership was. I’m a fan of darkly envisioned futures, but this one was too dark even for me. I guess what I like best about post-apocalyptic scenarios is not the despair but the hope. I’m Alas, Babylon, not On the Beach. I like the idea of the world starting over, people maybe doing things a little better this time. And Bacigalupi doesn’t show much mercy: for his characters, there doesn’t seem to be a way out.
But that was good, too, if difficult. Nailer and his friends live desperate lives scavenging the beach, working where they can, trying to escape abuse and exploitation, drugs and prostitution, hearing only rumors of a better world, a world of inconceivable security and luxury. And that’s really us, right? Nailer’s world is imagined, but it’s not that imagined; there are certainly teenagers elsewhere in our world who live existences Nailer could easily recognize. So even when Ship Breaker turned into a seafaring adventure story (ugh.), I stuck with it. I’m not sure what kind of teen I’d recommend Ship Breaker to, but it’s worth reading, to get caught up in the horror of Nailer’s world, and to see our own reflected.
So, I hesitated to bring up Grey’s Anatomy as my source of information about the stage 4 melanoma and IL2 treatment my (Vietnam War-era) coworker mentioned his brother had several years ago. But when I did, he exclaimed, “Oh! I remember that episode.”
