A Month in Summary - October 2024

Oxbow Bend

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

October 2024

How is everyone doing? Are you avoiding the news and headlines? More importantly, did you vote? This is such an anxious time for everyone in our country, and I'm trying to stay positive, trying (but failing) to stay away from the news. It helped to have the World Series as a distraction, but that's over now*, and although November 5th is election day, we may not feel relief for a very long time, no matter who we voted for.

My reading has fallen by the wayside this past week, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon. I have a book group discussion to lead and need to finish the book!

October's reading wasn't too bad, although my audiobook failed to hold my attention. It took me almost two full months to finish, and that was at a speed of 1.5. I did complete one novel that was fantastic (thank you, Stephen King!), one other that was very good (albeit disturbing for someone living on the Cascadia faultline), and another that was good, but easily forgotten. 

We got home from our big adventure to the Tetons in early October, got caught up on appointments and various things around the house for a couple of weeks, and then headed out for a trip down to Santa Rosa to visit my aunt. We will be home on Election Day, not that we expect any clear results by that night, but we don't really want to be traveling...

Books Read (click on the title for my review):

Watch Us Shine by Marisa de los Santos (3/5)

Tilt by Emma Pattee (4/5)

Holly by Stephen King (4.5/5)

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (2/5)

Movies & TV Series:

Slow Horses (Season 4) - Such a great show. I'm glad there is more in store for us with at least one or two more seasons.

Shrinking (Season 1) - I love this show. It's funny and touching, and the acting is very good. I'm glad I have another season to watch. It's always a good thing to laugh out loud.

L.A. Dodgers - We watched a lot of baseball in October. We saw them beat the Mets in Game Six to win the NL pennant, and then the New York Yankees in Game Five to win the World Series Championship. What a thrilling season!!

Travel:

As I mentioned above, we are currently on another trip, visiting my aunt in Santa Rosa. We love traveling down Hwy 101, and we especially love spending time with Sue (and her dog, Cooper).

Wildlife:

Last month I shared some landscape photos from our great adventure to Wyoming. This month, I'll leave you with some of the birds & waterfowl we spotted along the way.

Bluebird

Clark's Nutcracker

Bottoms Up!

Ruffed Grouse in hiding

California Quail

Take care of yourselves. Get outside and go for a walk. Read a book. Listen to music. Watch a comedy that will make you laugh. 

*Pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training on February 12th!

Tilt

 

Tilt by Emma Pattee

Fiction

2025 (Due out on March 4, 2025)

Finished on October 10, 2024

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing debut about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety.

Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people we love.

Emma Pattee's slim novel is easily read in a single day. We were on our 5-week Grand Teton road trip when I picked up my ARC of Tilt, and as much as I would have liked to have read it in one fell swoop, other interests and activities begged for my attention. But even without the distractions of the beautiful scenery, hikes to stunning viewpoints, and moose encounters, I'm not sure I'd want to read this story so quickly. Pattee's prose is poetic, yet not overly so, and I found myself re-reading her beautiful passages as I held my breath in anticipation of what Annie was experiencing in Portland, Oregon.

I grew up in Central and Southern California, and while not a regular occurence, earthquakes were not completely unheard of. I remember several in which I either jumped from wherever I was sitting to run to stand in a door frame, or awoke from a deep sleep, wondering why my husband was tossing and turning so violently. There was even one instance in which I thought somebody was trying to break into our house. The front door was loudly rattling and it wasn't until I saw the light fixture swaying in the dining room (and my young daughter screaming, "Make it stop!" as she ran down the stairs from her bedroom) that I realized it was an earthquake and not an intruder. 

And yet, until my husband and I moved to the Oregon Coast, we didn't give earthquakes much thought. Like any natural disaster, you could only do so much ahead of time. We moved from San Diego to Nebraska and became very familiar with tornadoes and severe thunderstorm watches and warnings. But in Oregon, we were quickly informed of THE BIG ONE! We live on the Cascadia subduction zone, which stretches from Northern Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino California, and will eventually wreak havoc on communities up and down the faultline, most likely with a magnitude 9.0 or greater. 

Like Annie and Dom, my husband and I have attended seminars and meetings on how to prepare for such a catastrophic earthquake. We have a "Go Bag" ready for the event in one of our cars. (Why don't we have one in both?!) We have stored gallons upon gallons of drinking water in our house and garage. We have not just two but three power stations (to recharge phones and other electronics, which will most likely not be of any use since the cell towers will be down), a gasoline generator (which is great until we run out of fuel), cash (vendors won't be able to process credit or ATM cards), and a couple of LifeStraws for water purification. There's still a lot we should/need to do, but it does get overwhelming. And, we live in a forest, surrounded by HUGE trees. Oh, and we're on the coast. We'll be lucky to survive the 100 foot tidal wave or falling trees.  

This is all to say that Tilt scared the crap out of me. Annie lost her purse in IKEA during the earthquake. She lost her phone. 

Every couple of minutes, I check my pockets for my phone. I can't help it. It's like a phantom limbl

Without a phone, I'm like an animal without legs. You have to understand about people my age is that we got phones before we had sex, we got phones before we got credit cards, before we started therapy, before we started drinking beer and cofffee and two-for-one margaritas at the shitty bar down the street. I learned to drive by following the glowing blue arrow wherever it took me.

How comforting it would be right now to trace my finger along a line of blue dots. To get an ETA. Something to press on, a screen to light up. To feel that I am connected to someone, somewhere, not just a lone body miles from home, jerking forward step by step under the sun.

Even if she had a "Go Bag" with water and food in her car, she wouldn't be able to retrieve it from the crushed vehicle. Annie encounters impassable roads and bridges. There are two bridges between us and the two closest towns. Those will be gone. We'll be stranded for weeks, if not months, before help arrives. Or I may be in town shopping and have to walk home to my family, just as Annie attempts to do, hoping to reunite with her husband. 

The last known megathrust earthquake in the northwest was in January, 1700, just over 300 years ago. Geological evidence indicates that such great earthquakes have occurred at least seven times in the last 3,500 years, a return interval of 400 to 600 years. (Pacific Northwest Seismic Network)

Maybe we'll get lucky and this won't happen in our lifetime. But to quote the geologist from Annie & Dom's seminar, "The worst day to prepare for an earthquake is the day the earthquake hits." 

Tilt is an intense read. I felt anxious and worried for Annie (and her unborn child, "Bean") the entire time I was reading. This story will stay with me a long time. Emma Pattee has written an impressive debut novel. Recommend (but maybe not to my local book group).

Parker House Rolls

Parker House Rolls

Growing up, I was not only lucky to know all four of my grandparents, but I also knew my maternal great-grandmother, Louise Ashbrook. I didn't know her as well as I knew her daughter (my grandmother), but I know that she loved nature and was an avid bird-watcher. She was also an exceptional painter of landscapes, as well as delicate scenes on hand-blown eggs, which several family members display at Eastertime. She was also know for her amazing Parker House rolls, which many of my relatives have attempted, over the years, to duplicate. She never measured her ingredients, grabbing handfuls of flour and pinches of sugar & salt, making it impossible for anyone to carry on her legacy. Until last week!

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a recipe for Parker House rolls that Kristen Doyle had shared on her blog (Dine and Dish). As usual, I printed the recipe and tossed it into a pile, later to be filed away and long forgotten. This year we're hosting our family gathering and I decided it was time to try my hand at Kristen's recipe (which she got courtesy of the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts). With the weather turning cold and rainy, I made plans to make stew one night and chicken and dumplings the next. What better than to have some tender, buttery rolls to go with that yummy comfort food! I dug through my files and found Kristen's recipe. I followed it almost exactly as written, opting for my KitchenAid mixer (with the bread hook attachment) instead of kneading the dough by hand. I was so pleased (ok, giddy with joy!) to not only have the dough rise perfectly the first time, but also after cutting out each little circle of dough. I waited longer than instructed to pop them in the oven since I was waiting for the rest of the meal to come together, but the kitchen was warm and the dough didn't collapse. 

The final verdict? Delicious! They're a bit lighter and fluffier than my great-grandmother's rolls, but they're the best I've ever made. I don't know which is better, serving them warm with salted butter or saving them for the next day and enjoying them with a little bit of mayo and leftover turkey. I guess I better double the recipe. Thanks, Kristen!

Ingredients

6 cups all-purpose flour (I used a little bit more)

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons salt

2 packages active dry yeast

1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened

1 large egg

In a large mixer bowl, combine 2 1/4 cups flour, sugar, salt, and yeast; add 1/2 cup butter (1 stick). 

With mixer at low speed, gradually pour 2 cups hot tap water (120 degrees F to 130 degrees F.) into mixture. 

Add egg; increase speed to medium; beat 2 minutes, scraping bowl with rubber spatula.

Beat in 3/4 cup flour or enough to make a thick batter; continue beating 2 minutes, occasionally scraping bowl. 

With spoon, stir in enough additional flour (about 2 1/2 cups) to make a soft dough. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes, working in more flour (about 1/2 cup) while kneading. (I used a bread hook and left the dough in the mixer.)

Shape dough into a ball and place in greased large bowl, turning over so that top of dough is greased. Cover with towel; let rise in warm place (80 to 85 degrees F.) until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours. (Dough is doubled when 2 fingers pressed into dough leave a dent.) 

Punch down dough by pushing down the center or dough with fist, then pushing edges of dough into center. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface; knead lightly to make smooth ball, cover with bowl for 15 minutes, and let dough rest. 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

In 17 1/4-inch by 11 1/2-inch roasting pan, over low heat, melt remaining 1/2 cup butter; tilt pan to grease bottom. (I used a large jelly roll/cookie sheet pan, brushed with some of the melted butter, leaving the rest in a bowl to dip into.)

On lightly floured surface with floured rolling pin, roll dough 1/2 inch thick. With floured 2 3/4-inch round cutter, cut dough into circles.

Holding dough circle by the edge, dip both sides into melted margarine or butter pan; fold in half.

Arrange folded dough in rows in pan, each nearly touching the other. 

Cover pan with towel; let dough rise in warm place until doubled, about 40 minutes.

Bake rolls for 15 to 18 minutes until browned. 

Recipe courtesy Omni Parker House Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts

Click on the link in the sidebar for more of my favorite recipes. 

Please visit The Intrepid Reader for Weekend Cooking.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.

Pork Chops with Sage Butter - Weekend Cooking

Today is Julia Child's birthday!

Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. ~ Julia Child

April 11, 1954: She eventually mastered the art of French cooking, but at 41, Julia Child was still figuring it all out. An attempt to make a beurre blanc for sea bass failed, much to her “quite hurt surprise.” (From Goodreads)

Well, one thing I've learned in the past 30+ years of cooking is that, like Julia Child, I'm still figuring it all out and that it takes a lot of practice. After trying America's Taste Kitchen recipe for Smothered Pork Chops with Onions and Bacon, I was on a mission to find the perfect recipe for pork chops. Each week, I try to have a wide variety of protein choices on our dinner menu. Chicken, shrimp, salmon, steak and ground beef always get top billing, but pork never seems to make the list unless I fix ribs. I think that's about to change. I came across a simple recipe for Your New Favorite Pork Chops in the March 2015 issue of Bon Appetit. It looked wonderful and I was pleased to see that it only requires seven ingredients. Perfect for a weeknight meal after a long day at work, followed by a pre-dinner walk or bike ride. 

Your New Favorite Pork Chops

Bon Appetit

(photo from magazine)

Doesn't that look delicious? Let me tell you, this is a winner! It was so good, I made it a second time later that week. But be forewarned. It's all about getting the right cut of pork and watching your time. I can't state strongly enough the importance of a good meat thermometer and timer. You don't want to guess with this recipe!

Bon Appetit's Pork Chops with Sage Butter

(aka Your New Favorite Pork Chop)

1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
2  1 1/2"-thick bone-in pork rib chops (8-10 oz. each)
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
8 sprigs sage (fresh)
2 garlic cloves, peeled, smashed
1 Tbsp. unsalted butter

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high. Season pork chops all over (including the fat cap) with salt and pepper. Cook pork chops until bottom side is golden brown, about 1 minute. Turn and cook on other side about 1 minute before turning again. Repeat this process, turning about every minute, until chops are deep golden brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 135 degrees, 8-10 minutes (cooking time will depend on thickness of chops). Do Not Overcook!

Remove pan from heat and add sage, garlic, and butter, smashing garlic into butter. Tilt skillet and spoon foaming butter and drippings over pork chops, making sure to baste the fat cap as well as the rib. Transfer pork chops to a cutting board and let rest at least 5 minutes (pork will come to 145 degrees as it sits).

Cut away bone and slice pork about 1/4" thick. Serve with any juices from the cutting board spooned over top.

Bon Appetit's Note:

Though it may seem like a counter-intuitive practice, extra flipping is the secret to the golden-brown crust on these chops.

Why we flip the chops: Frequent flipping produces a deep-brown crust and an evenly cooked rosy interior—plus, the meat cooks in less time since both sides are in near-constant contact with the pan. For best results, try this technique with the thickest, fattiest chops you can find.

My Notes:

The first night I made these, I used a pork rib chop that was not bone-in. I couldn't find one with the bone in at my grocery store. Nonetheless, the meat was tender and delicious! I probably cooked it for 8 minutes. After letting it rest for 5 minutes, it was at the desired temp of 145.

The second night I tried this recipe, I used a bone-in loin chop (pictured above). I should have used the meat thermometer as I was cooking the chops, rather than when I thought they were finished because I cooked them a little bit too long. Very disappointing! With the exception of the meat next to the bone, these chops were dry and tough. However, the flavor was outstanding!

This recipe will become one of my go-to dinners, but only as long as I take the time to get the right cut of meat from the butcher counter. It simply must be a pork rib chop (with or without the bone).

I served the chops with Martha Stewart's Macaroni & Cheese and sautéed zucchini & onions.

Please visit Beth Fish Reads for Weekend Cooking.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.

Traveling with Pomegranates

Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor
Nonfiction - Memoir/Travel
2009 Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition
Finished on 5/28/10
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fair)




We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
~Anaïs Nin

Product Description

An introspective and beautiful dual memoir by the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist and her daughter.

Sue Monk Kidd has touched the hearts of millions of readers with her beloved novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, and with her acclaimed nonfiction. Now, in this wise and intimate dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, a writer making her affecting debut in these pages, chronicle their travels together, and offer their distinct perspectives as a fifty-something and a twenty-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other.

Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel together to the sacred sites throughout Greece and France. Sue, newly aware of aging, caught in a creative vacuum, and longing to reconnect with her now grown daughter, struggles to find the wherewithal to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. The intimacy of travel and the wondrous nature of the places Sue and Ann visit bring forth each woman's internal struggle and provide fertile terrain for reflection and inspiration. In voices candid and lyrical, this modern-day Demeter and Persephone explore the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites in Athens and Eleusis, Paris and Rocamadour, and places in between. They also give voice to a moving transformation of that most protean of human connections: the bond of mothers and daughters.

A wise and engrossing book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a strong new voice, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere.

I spent most of May listening to this book while driving around town in my car. As it turns out, it was the perfect book to listen to rather than read. The allusions to ancient symbols, mythology and the "sacred" began to wear on me, and it was easy to let my mind wander, momentarily tuning out the repetitious references while driving to and from work. Had I read the book, I would have certainly lost interest and given up early on. However, I did find myself wishing that I had the book to occasionally glance at and mark passages for future reference. The three maps (one of the eastern states of the U.S., one of France, and one of Greece & Turkey) would have been helpful to look at before starting each new chapter, and the following Table of Contents would have added to the points of reference:

LOSS
Greece/Turkey/South Carolina
1998 - 1999

SEARCH
France/South Carolina
1999 - 2000

RETURN
Greece
2000

AFTERWARD
September 2008

The authors narrate alternating chapters and my initial reaction to Sue's voice was that of annoyance and displeasure. She enunciates each and every word and syllable so precisely that she sounds unnatural and awkward. Ann, on the other hand, speaks in a relaxed, yet enthusiastic voice, drawing me into her narrative more so than her mother. Kind of ironic since I'm much closer to Sue's age than Ann's. But I did relate to Sue's role as a woman approaching the second half of her life, as well as that of a mother of an adult daughter.

Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet she's performing—her slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scene reminds me of something, a memory maybe, but I can't recall what. I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me I'm possessed by an acute feeling of loss.

It's the summer of 1998, a few days before my fiftieth birthday. Ann and I have been in Athens a whole twenty-seven hours, a good portion of which I've spent lying awake in a room in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for blessed daylight. I tell myself the bereft feeling that washed over me means nothing—I'm jet-lagged, that's all. But that doesn't feel particularly convincing.

I close my eyes and even in the tumult of the museum, where there seem to be ten tourists per square inch, I know the feeling is actually everything. It is the undisclosed reason I've come to the other side of the world with my daughter. Because in a way which makes no sense, she seems lost to me now. Because she is grown and a stranger. And I miss her almost violently.

and

Lying on the twin mattress, I stare at the edge of light oozing under the curtain and I think about my relationship with my daughter. Congenial, warm, nice—those are the words that come to me. We've never had one of those pyrotechnic relationships that end up being written about so often and famously in books.

We've had our moments, naturally. The period of mild rebellion when she was fourteen springs to mind, a phase when the door slammed a lot. Beyond that, we had the typical antagonisms and disagreements. I suspect like most mothers and daughters we've participated in the classic struggle: the mother, trying to let her daughter go while unconsciously seeing her as an appendage of herself. And the daughter, enmeshed in her mother's power, compelled to please her and pattern herself in her mother's image, but straining at the same time to craft an identity separate from her.

Mostly, though, our relationship has been full of goodness. I would even say, given the natural constraints of adolescent girls and their mothers, we've been close. And yet I feel my relationship with Ann now exists largely on the surface. There is distance in it that I have trouble characterizing. We talk, for instance, but nothing really heart to heart. It's as if the relationship has fallen into a strange purgatory. For so long our roles were strictly defined as mother and daughter, as adult and child. But now as she leaves college, we both seem to sense some finality to this. She is changing and I am changing, too, but we don't quite know how to shift the conversations between ourselves. How to reforge our connection.

I feel traces of guilt about the growing distance between us. I toss on the bed, remembering that while she was away at school metamorphosing into the young woman I barely know, I was too busy with a book project to notice she was gone. Her leaving was not a problem. At least not in the maternal trench where these things are usually battled out. What's more, I was proud of this. I chirped to my friends: "I don't know what the big deal is about the empty nest. It's kind of wonderful, actually."

and now from Ann's point-of-view:

Catching my eye, she waves and begins to wind her way toward me through the other tourists. I wonder why I can't tell her what I'm going through. When it came to the letter back home [a letter in which Ann's application to study ancient Greek history at the University of South Carolina's graduate program is rejected], still in the drawer with my gym socks (why did I keep it, this evidence against myself?) certainly I didn't think she'd reject me. Perhaps the shame of failing is not my only reason for not talking to her about it. We've been close since childhood, but I feel a kind of partition between us now, not anger or aloofness, but a room divider that properly marks the space: this is your territory, this is mine. I did not confide intensely personal matters to her. Are the particulars of your own darkness something you describe to your mother or your best friend?

But it wasn't just the darkness I secreted, was it? Why did I give her only the postcard version of my first trip to Greece? Ran a race in Olympia, visited Athena's Tholos, saw the Charioteer, sat beside Parthenon, danced in a restaurant with some locals, bought a pretty ring...having a great time—wish you were here. Obviously she knew I'd been affected enough to want to spend my life teaching ancient Greek history, but I'd left her to sense for herself the deeper imprint those experiences made on me. Maybe it was the particulars of my soul—the experiences, feelings, and inner thoughts I held close—that I kept from her.

Final thoughts: Overall, I enjoyed listening to this memoir. In addition to the whole mother-daughter dance and travel stories, I found it interesting to learn about Sue's initial ideas for her novel, The Secret Life of Bees (a book I've read and enjoyed more than once), as well as Ann discovery of her own passion for writing. And yet, this isn't a book I want to own or read again.

Go here to listen to Ann and Sue deliver the commencement address at Scripps College in Claremont, California.