Fall Eating and Reading

Fall is a time for eating and reading.  Really any season is but fall seems to be more so than others.  Weeding is mostly done for the year - just some remnants in the veggie and flower gardens to clean up and compost, some leaves to rake and mulch.  Creating will happen soon too with a fall scrap booking retreat usually scheduled (called off this year but I'll post more about my plans for that weekend later), knitting projects to pick back up.  But right now, as a football game drones on in another part of the house, my thoughts turn to eating and reading.

Eating: Today we made our second trip to the orchard this year.  We typically go with friends and with so little on the calendar this fall, all of our schedules were clear 2 weeks ago.  We met them there and each picked a full bag (about 10 pounds) of SweeTango.  E and I also bought a 10 pound bag of pre-picked Paula Red seconds (not the prettiest bunch of apples but certainly good enough for sauce and a good deal at only a couple of dollars for the whole thing).  I made a batch of applesauce, then some applesauce muffins and also an apple crisp, all of the recipes I have posted before.  It smelled delicious at our house.  The SweeTango are a delicious variety for eating fresh.  It is an apple variety developed at the University of Minnesota (Ska-U-Mah!) and is a cross between the Honeycrisp and the Zestar (which are 2 other U of M "alum" apples).  Crisp, and the perfect mix of sweet and tangy, a SweeTango a day is keeping the doctor away at my house.

The drawback to going early in the picking season is that the apples I love most for baking, Haralson, was not yet ready.  Haralson is yet another U of M developed apple but from way back in 1913!  My friend's favorite apple is MacIntosh and they were not yet available two weeks ago. So she and I made a plan to meet at the orchard again when those apples were ready.  She wasn't available so we met her family at the orchard today and picked Haralson and Honeycrisp.  We had an early dinner/late lunch in the park and I brought dessert.  I had this idea for applesauce cupcakes with apple cider glaze.  It is a work in progress but I will post it here for you to try.  The cupcakes are the same recipe as my applesauce struesel muffin, but subtract off the topping, then add glaze/icing.  As I told E, the only difference between a muffin and a cupcake is frosting.  That happens to be the difference that allows muffins to be ok for breakfast but cupcakes not.

Applesauce Cupcakes with Apple Cider Glaze

Makes about 18 medium size muffins/cupcakes.  Line muffin pan with paper or silicon cups or spray very well with non-stick spray (they will probably still stick).  I love the reusable silicon cups I got many years ago and still use.  If you don't want/need 18 cupcakes, refrigerate the batter in a closed container for use in up to a couple of days, or make and freeze the cupcakes for later.

Preheat oven to 375.  

Combine: 1 1/2 C flour

1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt

Mix together: 2 eggs

2/3 C brown sugar

Add eggs/sugar mixture to the dry ingredients.

Stir in: 6 Tbls butter, melted
1 1/2 C applesauce

Mix just until combined.

Divide batter into muffin cups.
Bake for 20 minutes. The top should spring back when touched.

Remove from pan and cool completely on a wire rack.

When cool, top with glaze.

Apple Cider Glaze

In medium bowl, measure about 2 C. powdered sugar

Whisk in small amounts of apple cider (start with 1 tablespoon) until spreadable.

The glaze is the part that needs some tweaking.  I started with a recipe I found on-line which called for 1/4 C cider and 1 C. powdered sugar.  It was waaaaay too runny and all it did was soak into the cupcake.  I added at least another cup of sugar and it was still very liquid.  I really want the cider flavor to pop, though, so next time I will try reducing the cider (cooking to reduce the amount of water) to enhance that flavor without having to use as much liquid.  And I will add the cider gradually (and only the minimum amount to make it spreadable) instead of dumping in the full amount of cider into the sugar like the other recipe said to do.

There it is.  Let me know what you think.

Reading: 

I have no less than 6 books started right now.  I have struggled with difficulty focusing for the past 6 months and keep starting new books to see if it is just the material or if it is my brain.  Mostly, it seems to be my brain.  I have managed to finish half of the goal I set for this year (36) which Goodreads tells me is 8 books behind plan.  Here are a couple of books that stand out so far.

The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood - Back in February (which seems like at least a decade ago now), I re-read one of my all-time-favorite books by one of my top-five-favorite authors, The Handmaid's Tale.  I have blogged about this one before (2003) and yes, I know it is now a popular TV series, but I read it yet again because I wanted to refresh my brain on the story before I read the new sequel The Testaments.  Every bit as chilling as I remember it, the dystopian society in the not-so-distant future (and feeling more and more relevant every passing month lately), where women have no power over their own bodies or any say in what happens to them, where they are separated by purpose - the handmaids for their reproductive purposes, the Marthas for cooking and cleaning, UnWomen who have been banished to the colonies for not conforming to the new norms. Gilead is where the rights of women and our fights for silly things like equal pay, the right to work while pregnant, access to our own banking and credit accounts are fading memories.  The Testaments picks up after the Handmaid though does not continue the story of Offred.  It is set 15 years after the first book and is narrated by 3 very different characters: Aunt Lydia (Aunts "train" the Handmaids and this particular Aunt is a character in the first book), Agnes, a young woman who has grown up in Gilead, and Daisy, a young woman who is living in Canada.  The new novel was different than the classic Handmaid (and not the same as the continuation of the Hulu series, I have heard) but still a gripping and scary (as in a "I can see this happening" sort of way) book, with underlying currents of hope and the will to continue the fight against oppression.  Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Currently I am reading Laurentian Divide, the second in a series by Sarah Stonich.  The first one was a novel in short stories called Vacationland which I loved.  Both books take place mainly in Hatchet Inlet, a small town in northern Minnesota, just across the border from Canada.  Both are filled with the quirky inhabitants of and visitors to this town and the summer resort area nearby.  Part of what I liked so much about the first book was the people - they are real and I felt like I already knew them.  Yet everyone has stories, pains and joys that they don't share and these are those stories.  Vacationland was not told in linear fashion and each chapter could stand on its own as a short story, with different characters in the forefront or narrating at turns, but showing up in others' stories as well. Stonich's full-bodied descriptions make the place, the land and the lake as much characters as the people are.  I am so excited to continue on with Laurentian Divide to see some of the friends that I made in Vacationland and get to know more about some of the others I only glimpsed before.

Until we read and eat again,

Hallie

From the Archives - Highlights of 2013 Reading, Part 2

Another entry "from the archives" - found in my draft folder from early 2014.   May this tide you over until I post new/recent material.

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Reading: As I said in a previous post, I read 44 books in 2013.  Of those, 19 were Newbery Medal winners and I blogged the highlights of those the other day.  What were the other 25 books?

Favorites:
The Romanov Bride by Richard Alexander, which I previously wrote about here.
The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club by Laurie Notaro
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (I blogged about those 3 here)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - A magical novel that had me from the first page and kept me entranced until the end.  I found myself sitting on the edge of the bathtub in a hotel room in the middle of the night just so I could find out how the story ended.  I was mesmerized by the idea of a circus that arrives without notice and is only open at night.  The vivid descriptions brought this fantastical circus to life and the multiple intriguing story lines kept me guessing how and when they were going to intertwine.  The main plot line centers on two young magicians who have been trained since youth expressly for a competition between their instructors.  Unaware of the competition and that ultimately only one can be left standing, the two fall in love.  There are many characters but my favorite characters were the circus itself (named Le Cirque des Reves, which means Circus of Dreams), and the Reveurs, a group of devoted fans who identify themselves to each other by dressing in black and white (like the circus) with a dash of red.  My book club enjoyed this book also, and the majority of us showed up to the discussion dressed in black and white with a bit of red.
Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa - This is a non-fiction book about Oscar, a cat who lives in a nursing home and only spends time with the patients who are about to die. Sound depressing? It really was not.  The peace that this cat brought to the patients in their final moments was comforting.

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... and 19 others that there it is unlikely I will remember now 6-7 years later.

Until we read again,

Hallie  

From the Archives - In Memory of Mary

I found this post in my drafts from early 2014. I post it now, remembering Mary as I also celebrate the life of my Grandma.

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My friend Mary passed away in October 2013 after a nearly year long battle with kidney cancer that had metastasized to her brain before she even knew she had it. It was a difficult year for her: struggles with treatment, reactions to chemo, seizures, loss of abilities.  The funeral was packed.  I guess that's what happens when a person is only 55 and has touched so many lives. 

I met Mary through a friend/coworker when I was also introduced to scrap booking.  I have to note here that I never thought I would be come a scrap booker.  I used to call it "crap booking" and couldn't see the point of chopping up my photos and putting a bunch of junk in my album, of decorating the pages with baubles, stickers and fancy paper.  Somehow, I decided to go and check out an open house scrap booking thing Krista was having at her house.  As suggested, I brought a couple photos with.  I chose some pictures of my cat, Oscar.  Heaven knows I had plenty of those.  I can't help it - orange tabbies are highly photogenic.  Anyway, I started with just a little sample packet which just happened to coordinate nicely with the coloring of the cat.  Next thing I knew, I had the first page of Oscar's album and was making an order for more supplies.  And I went back to Krista's several more times for scrap booking sessions.  Part of the joy of scrap booking, for me, was the camaraderie.  Hanging out in Krista's basement workroom with Mary, Mary Kay, Mama Jere and the other girls, I found common bonds.  These were creative women who made beautiful scrap books.  Some of the pages were elaborate, some of them simple, all telling a story important to the woman creating the page.  Tales of travel, tales of a belly dancing troupe, tales of gardens, motorcycle trips, weddings and more.  I started joining them on retreats, spending a long weekend in a little cabin in the woods and later a retreat center build especially for scrap booking retreats, working on my own books.  I have completed Oscar's little album and several volumes of travel albums.  Mary was there for most of my scrap booking.  I liked the other ladies, but I really connected with Mary. 

Mary knew a lot about a lot.  She had a wicked sense of humor and lots of opinions. She was talented and loved to offer advice.  A designer and professional organizer, her sense of color and style was a terrific help.  I remember struggling to find the right paper to set off some pictures of a fortress I had visited in France.  I had a couple hundred sheets of paper in dozens of different colors and was about to just use black, my default background, when Mary pointed across the table to a color I never would have even looked at. I had thought it a hideous shade of poopy tan. "That one.  That's the one.  Do you have 2 sheets?  Do a double truck (2 pages side by side) and draw lines on it to look like the brick in the photos."  Genius.  It matched perfectly and turned into a terrific brick wall background.  Another time, she found the perfect shade of green (again a color I thought was kind of gross) which set off the foliage of Kauai like it had been color-matched by a computer.  Then she helped make the perfectly-colored bird-of-paradise paper flower to coordinate with the picture.  She offered tons of advice and encouragement on one of my more insane ideas - a paper stained glass window which mimicked the windows in a church E had taken a picture of in Hawaii.  She lent her exacto knife and helped with the shaping of the window, and then kept me going as I place all the little teeny pieces of paper in the "window". Hours later, I had finished one of the coolest, most frustrating things I had ever made for an album. 

These are just some of the scrap booking memories I have of Mary.  She also inspired me to seek out a belly dance class (she and some of the others we scrap booked with knew each other from when they were in a belly dance troupe together).  She offered advice, when I asked, about remodeling my kitchen. She made me laugh, A LOT.  Riding as passenger in my car she would say, "No cars!" and then as I entered the intersection, she'd add "Only vans, buses and trucks!"  She would wave to the mannequin in a car perched a top a tall billboard in Minneapolis - every single time we drove past it.  She would bob her head and sing "Raahr, raahr, raahr" in her best death metal voice when something like Rage Against the Machine played on the iPod in the scrapping room. And then say "I LOVE this music" with a sarcastic roll of the eyes.  Eating fries at McDonald's, Mary would shake the extra salt off each and every fry before she ate it - because of the hypertension, you know.

*****

Even now as I read this nearly 6 years after Mary's passing, I realize how much I still miss her.  Scrap booking is still fun and I love the group of women that I retreat with now (including my little sister!) but scrapping still makes me think of Mary and wonder what color paper she would advise, or what crazy-ambitious detail she would inspire.  And if ever RATM comes on the radio, I will say "Raahr, raahr, raahr - I LOVE this song!"

Mary is the one who is a friend of the author of Hit by a Farm which I blogged about before. If you want more stories about Mary, check out Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep and Enough Wool to Save the Planet also by Catherine Friend.

Mary, I am sorry that it took me all this time to get this posted.  Please hug my grandma who recently joined you in the great hereafter.  

Until we all meet again,

Hallie

Disclosure

Reading, Eating and Weeding is a personal blog written and edited by me.  Opinions are mine. Beliefs are mine. Experiences are either mine or observed by me. Stories are mine. All material is copyrighted, but you are welcome to share anything written herein with a link back to the original page and credit.

I do not accept any form of advertising or sponsorship.  If I do write about products, services, companies, etc, it's because I went there, bought the product myself, and had a strong enough opinion that I wanted to share it with you.  If, however, you would like to just GIVE me money, I would be alright with that plan and an address can be provided.

While I have not been compensated monetarily and possibly influenced thus, I've lived a life.  My opinions are influenced by my background, my religion, my political beliefs, and my experiences.  This is a personal blog, not an unbiased newspaper.

Thank you to Joanne for allowing me to lift her disclosure.

 I Am Back!

There has been a request to revive the blog.  When I logged in, I found a couple of out-dated pending posts.  

Watch for new "From the Archives" posts coming soon, and then perhaps some brand new material.

Do I still read, eat and weed?  Stay tuned and find out!

Until we blog again,

Hallie