Today I am grateful for rain, getting bank charges waived, staying calm, texting (especially with people in other time zones), Mad Men On Demand sans commercials, decaf iced tea, a solo drive, a chat with my BFF, my thrifty skills, And the Green Grass Grew All Around, waking up before Babyface and reading, health insurance, advice, and turning last night's Slow Cooker Homestyle Roast Chicken into Slow Cooker Chicken Pot Pie based on a recipe I found in Real Simple (swapped out milk for cream, more peas and carrots for green beans, and some frozen pie crust instead of puff pastry).

Springtime!

Recently bare trees have filled out their branches with blooms, leaves, buds, and birds.

Here's a cooking tip from me to you.  If you plan on doubling a recipe, double the butter, then get distracted, go back to the recipe, forget to double the other ingredients, and bake, it will smell amazing.  Like nothing you've ever made before.  But it will look and taste horrible.

Bargain Day: Toddler Swimsuit

Babyface's big baby belly makes his swimsuit very snug.  So I've been keeping my eye out for a new-to-him bathing suit for summer.  I checked the consignment store and what they had was ugly and expensive, my least favorite combination.  I tried another consignment store in a tony area but just couldn't find what I was looking for. My mom checked out her local consignment store and called me from Costco when she saw toddler swimsuits there.

Until today.  I went to my preferred thrift store (yes, with $20 in my pocket) where I found a darling suit in great shape for summer.  And since the thrift store offers 25% off all merchandise on Mondays, the $2.49 suit was $1.86.  I could have paid for it in change.  But I didn't since I also bought books.  After a tumble in the washing machine the cute suit will be ready for a summer in the pool.

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

Once I started reading Jan-Philipp Sendker's The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, I could hardly put it down. In the story, a daughter searches for her missing father in Burma and finds herself learning more about him than she could have guessed in her wildest dream. The story goes from the present day to 1950's Burma and explores themes of love, loss, family, identity and tradition. What really sets this book ahead of the pack is the beautiful writing. My blog reader Linda said that it read almost like a poem and she was not wrong.  

Healthy Cookies

Recently, StumbleUpon sent me a link to 34 Insanely Simple Two Ingredient Recipes.  I already knew some of them but when I saw the recipe for 2 Ingredient Cookies, I thought my eyes were deceiving me.  How could these possibly be good?

Oh, but they are.  I'm not one to leave the yummy out of cookies, so I had to include walnuts and chocolate chips.  I halved the original recipe so that I could eat them while they were fresh.  I made these yesterday and the day before and both batches were good.  

Healthy Cookies Ingredients:
1 med/large banana, brown is fine
1/2c old fashioned oats
1 scant T chocolate chips
8 walnut halves, broken

First, mush up the banana with a fork.

Stir in oats, then chocolate chips and walnuts.

The crispy parts are the tastiest, so the smaller you can make these, the better, so there's more crispy parts.

Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes.  They look about the same coming out of the oven as going in, but the bottoms get the aforementioned crispy goodness and the mushiness becomes more solid.

I ate most of them last night and then had a few for breakfast.  They were okay today but definitely better last night.

The consistency of these is pretty close to that of a cookie though it's much less sweet.  These could also very easily be made vegan by using dairy-free chocolate chips or leaving them out altogether and putting in raisins or currants.  While I enjoyed them, My Heart's Desire was not fooled by the lack of eggs, butter, sugar, flour and didn't try any.

I would make these for Babyface (leaving out the chocolate chips) and myself  if we were going somewhere that I needed yummy snacks that would be good at any temperature.

Today I am grateful for perspective, new opportunities, four ingredient healthy cookies (recipe coming soon), a wedding invitation, hot water, sunshine, a great, long walk outside with Babyface, unlimited free books at the library, things to look forward to, generosity, and the outpouring of love for Boston.

Free Advice

Saved by Cake

I really enjoy Marian Keyes' fiction and nonfiction.  I had high hopes for her recent book, Saved by Cake.  It was touted as being "an extremely honest account of Marian Keyes' recent battle with depression, and how baking has helped her."  

I thought that the book would be part memoir, part cookbook.  She pours her heart out in the first four pages and the rest is a cookbook of desserts that she made rather than commit suicide.  As she says, "To be perfectly blunt about it, my choice sometimes is: I can kill myself or I can make a dozen cupcakes.  Right so, I'll do the cupcakes and I can kill myself tomorrow." 

Since Saved by Cake is 98% cookbook, it wasn't quite what I was expecting.  The baking instructions are definitely written in her very conversational style, but I was hoping for more of her story.    

Some of the recipes are quite continental.  I'd never heard of many of them, such as Millionaire's Shortbread, Barmbrack, and Chocolate and Treacle Cookies.  I would like to try my hand at making the No-Bake (of course) Ginger and Lime Cheesecake and Mini Key Lime Pies.  Are you seeing a lime theme here? Perhaps this spring or summer I will attempt one of her lime creations.  

What makes me a good cook—that I can improvise, rarely measure, don't need recipes—is what makes me an inconsistent baker.  My kitchen attitude of close enough/more or less/easy substitutions translates into some baking disasters.  I have been known to ruin a cake made from a box where all I have to do is add water, vegetable oil and eggs.  

For My Heart's Desire's birthday last month, I made him a slightly modified version of Paula Deen's Pink Lemonade Cake and had poured it into the pans when I realized I had forgotten to include the eggs.  I poured the batter back into the bowl and added the eggs and baked the cakes, which turned out fine.  Then when I followed Paula's frosting instructions exactly: beat together confectioners' sugar and butter until fluffy, I put both the ingredients into the mixer at the same time and ended up with some very buttery sugar.  A quick online search showed me that frosting occurs when a the sugar is added to whipped butter in small amounts.  So My Heart's Desire's birthday cake had only half of the frosting that the recipe called for since I ran out of powdered sugar.  I didn't miss it and neither did he.  But I did have a backup dessert on hand just in case the Pink Lemonade Cake had been a flop.

Slow Cooker Pesto Chicken and Mushrooms

This recipe is so good I didn't have time to take a picture of it before dinner.  A friend gave me the original recipe and I modified it slightly. The very best thing about this meal is the taste.  The second best thing is that it can cook fast if you are in a hurry, like I was recently.  I forgot to put it in the crock until 4:45 and we had dinner at 7:00.  And it was good. 

Ingredients:

Crushed garlic

Diced onions (of course I use frozen)

1 container pesto (I used Classico because it was on sale)

1/3 c chicken broth

1 box fresh, sliced mushrooms (I prefer the sliced baby bella, but any mushroom works)

4-6 chicken pieces, boneless, skinless chicken breasts or chicken thighs or a combination of breasts and thighs

Put all ingredients in slow cooker and mix well.  Cook on low for 3-4 hours or on high for 2-3. I always use the probe that came with the slow cooker to make sure it's cooked to the proper temperature.  Then serve over pasta.  I put it over angel hair (what we bought at Costco) and sprinkled a little Parmesan on top.  

All of the flavors really come together nicely in the slow cooker.  It's really, really easy.  If you can open jars and make pasta, this dish is a delight for the taste buds.   It's one of My Heart's Desire's favorites.  He thinks it tastes even better the second day.  

Today I am grateful for lunch with my honorary Grandma, pictures and videos of my adorable nieces, Babyface's moo (answer to the question: What does a cow say?), high speed Internet, health insurance, a dinner I did not make, gas in my car, a spare pair of sunglasses since a rainy day became a super bright day, clean clothes, the laundry line is back in action, fresh air, cherry blossoms, forsythia, daffodils, allergy medicine, having a flexible plan, grapefruit water, library books, and learning to let go.

February and March Books

I was a busy reader in February and March.  I went on two trips and had lots of time to read on planes. I am the kind of person that always has my nose in a book or a Kindle nearby.

Go to the Bookstore

The Promise of Stardust by Priscille Sibley had me hooked from the first chapter.  A moral dilemma, a bereaved husband, a baby, and a complicated family history made for a compelling read.  I had a knee-jerk reaction to the sympathetic portrayal of a career anti-choice lawyer.  The book made me curious about the author's politics though I couldn't find a definitive answer online. It reminded me in a way of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper.  I should mention that was the only Picoult book I really liked.  

Marian Keyes is one of my favorite contemporary authors and I am very fond her Walsh sisters books, Rachel's Holiday being my favorite.  So I got a big kick out of Mammy Walsh's A-Z of the Walsh Family short.  And it is quite short, a mere 66 pages. If you are already a big Keyes fan and are up to date with the Walsh family, then it's worth the $2.99. It also includes the long definition of a Feathery Stroker. 

Visit the Library

If you didn't know, now you do: I love The Hunger Games.  I inhaled the series and have read each of the three books more than once.  So when I saw The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy by Leah Wilson, et al. was available from the library, I couldn't resist.  It's like listening in on your favorite writing professors talking about The Hunger Games and what everything means. I didn't love every essay but enjoyed the collection as a whole.

The History of Us by Leah Stewart starts with a family tragedy and a woman uprooting her life to care for her sister's young children.  Instead of showing us how the family heals, the book starts when the children are grown and life-changing decisions still have to be made. 

Wish you knew what happened to Harvard grads way after the fact?  The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan explores the lives of a group of friends 20 years after graduation.  It has what you'd expect: career and relationship drama, disappointments, and nothing else.  I was hoping for more. 

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson definitely had some hilarious parts.  But I felt like she pulled her punches when it came to the real, emotional stories.  

Why, oh why, did I read these five books by Lani Diane Rich?  Because they were inexpensive Kindle books, just fluffy enough, and perfect for reading with my seatback and tray table reclined.  At two for $5, they fit into my tight budget.  The titles were Time Off For Good Behavior, Ex And The Single Girl, Maybe Baby, The Comeback Kiss and A Little Ray Of Sunshine.

Jill Smolinsk's Objects of My Affection is a beach book about a professional organizer with a teenaged son in rehab tasked with organizing a nutty, formerly famous, reclusive artist/hoarder.  Considering some of the serious topics in the book (bankruptcy, rehab, heartbreak) I thought it would go deeper than it did. 

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker was yet another coming of age tale set in a precarious future where the Earth no longer spins as it once did.  The slowing affects everything and everyone.  I'm usually not a big fan of sci-fi fantasy, and this book was okay but not great.  The reason it's on this list and not the one below is because it has good writing. 

All that being said, I did enjoy Dog Stars by Peter Heller.  The novel is about Hig, a man living in an airplane hangar after a flu pandemic has destroyed life as we know it.  How Hig survives and what he lives with kept me turning the pages. 

While I was reading We the Animals by Justin Torres I made a bet with myself that he was a writer from the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  I won that bet.  Beautiful writing about a childhood with brothers (the animals), poverty, violence, young parents working blue-collar jobs around the clock, and so much more.

Have a V8

I picked up  Philippa Gregory's The Kingmaker's Daughter because I liked The Bolyen Sisters so much.  This historical novel is a long, bloody, long, tale of family relationships, and political games.  Did I mention it was long? 

I wanted to like The Pretty One by Lucinda Rosenfeld a lot more than I did.  Three sisters, family drama, etc., but I couldn't really connect with it.  I liked her other book, I'm So Happy for You, that I also read on a plane, which is why I borrowed this one.

I am so glad that I borrowed 150 Pounds by Kate Rockland from the library.  If I had paid even one penny for it, that would have been too much.  Two stereotypical bloggers,  one overweight, one severely underweight, go through changes where—spoiler alert!—at the end they both end up weighing 150lbs. 

It's more than a little embarrassing to admit I read The ex-Mrs. Hedgefund by Jill Kargman.  I did and found myself not liking it but not being able to walk away from it.  I guess I was hoping it would have some redeeming quality.  I'm still waiting. 

For some reason, I thought Amanda Coplin's The Orchardist was called The Orchidist. I can report not one orchid appears in this novel.  It's lengthy and even though there is a fair amount of action, it was hard to feel strongly about any of it.   

MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche would have made an enjoyable magazine article.  However, a juvenile writing style and too much filler (including a Webster's dictionary definition of a friend) made this book a dud. 

I borrowed Reinventing Claire by Darian Wilk from the Kindle library, then realized that it was a romance novel, which is not my cup of tea.  

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes is the book version of what I imagine a British Lifetime movie would be like. 

I Love March Madness

Finally, after lo these many years, I'm enthusiastic about March Madness!  You read right, this not-really-a-sports-fan is super excited about March Madness!

Recently, I was greeted at the library by this giant March Madness Book Bracket poster.  I love it!  My favorites in this series were Gone Girl, Life of Pi, and, of course, The Hunger Games.  I read The Poisonwood Bible three times: once for pleasure and abandoned it pretty early on since I didn't find it enjoyable, second for a graduate class where I slogged through every page, and the third time was for a different graduate class, where I fell in love with it.

Babyface and I are regulars at a couple of local libraries, where we pick up novels and books on CD for me, toddler-friendly books for him, listen to about five minutes of story time, play with the library's toys, and eat raisins.  I can't wait to see what books win this March Madness!

Mixed Green Salad with Grapefruit, Pecans, and Feta

I made this salad with things I had on hand and was happily surprised at how well it turned out.  I mixed greens, sliced grape tomatoes, feta, grapefruit chunks (thanks, fruit of the month club), pecans, and balsamic vinaigrette (I like Trader Joe's). I mix the whole thing in a colander so that the dressing is distributed evenly. I have a feeling this salad is going to be popular on my spring and summer table.