He Named Me Malala

I confess that I never go to the movies. Or maybe once a year - which is awfully close to never. It means that by the time the Oscars roll around, I've rarely seen any of the nominated films. One movie that I missed when it came out - though it didn't get an Oscar nomination - is He Named Me Malala. I'm pretty happy that it's going to be on television next week, and at a reasonable hour so my twelve year old daughter can watch with me, and on a commercial-free channel so we don't have to DVR it to watch later.

If you'd wanted to see it too, it's on on Monday February 29 on the National Geographic channel at 8:00pm (Eastern).

Would you like some freshly ground wood shavings?

Today's entertaining/appalling news story is that "The Parmesan Cheese You Sprinkle on Your Penne Could Be Wood".

Now, they aren't talking about fancy aged Parmigiano Reggiano, freshly grated with your super sharp Microplane. No, they mean those cardboard cans of cheese dust:

According to the FDA’s report on Castle, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “no parmesan cheese was used to manufacture” ... [snip] ... Instead, there was a mixture of Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and cellulose, according to the FDA.

Yum.

However, I am reminded of my childhood. In the pantry, screwed onto a shelf, there lived a cheese grater. It was sturdy metal, with a wooden handled crank, and a knobbed wood block to force the cheese down towards the grating cylinder.

On spaghetti dinner nights, one of us children would be deputized to cheese grating duty. Moky would hand us a lump of cheese and a bowl, and staring idly out the window onto the driveway, we'd grate enough for a few plates of pasta. Sometimes, she'd be more ambitious, and we'd have to grate enough to fill up an old blue quart-sized Mason jar. That Mason jar, with a zinc lid, lived in the door of the refrigerator, cheek by jowl with a Mason jar full of sweetened grated coconut. Once, I was sick, confined to my bed on a spaghetti night. My mother decided that I could have pasta with butter & cheese for dinner, no red sauce. One of my siblings brought up my dinner; it was pasta with butter & coconut. The blue Mason jars of grated white stuff were unmarked. Happily, it wasn't as awful as it could have been: no red sauce.

I digress.

The wood block pusher was shaped at the grater end - rounded to conform to the shape of the cylinder. One day, I was doing the grating, and I put that wood block pusher in wrong - it was rotated 90° and therefore no longer conforming to the cylinder.

Yes, Virginia, there were wood shavings in the parmesan that night. And the wood block was never the same.

We Shall Overcome

Me, heathen atheist, I only set foot in churches for weddings, funerals, and sightseeing. Yesterday morning, though, found me in pew 12 on the far left aisle, trying to be inconspicuous. The girl joined a youth choir earlier in the year, and it rehearses at a nearby Presbyterian church, and as a "thank you" the choir sings at a service once in a while. So I went, as designated driver and good sport.

Anyway, as I told the girl, part of knowing how to be a human is learning things about what other people do, like worship, especially if you yourself are not a worshipper. Going to church is a chance to experience the physicality of standing and sitting (and maybe kneeling), and to hear the susurrus of the "trespass against us", and to think about the call & response so often embedded in services. I secretly love singing hymns - it's a chance to exercise my sight singing chops. And yesterday there was a Ghanaian folk song included - so I got to think about the subtly non-Western rhythm and melody of that particular hymn.

But mostly what I was thinking about, in pew 12 on the left aisle, was Christianity. The people in that church yesterday were good, right-minded people, people with a social conscience, working on homeless outreach, looking for a new leader of the LGBT committee, praising the Iranian accord and that it resulted from diplomacy, not war. The sermon was given by a visitor, a white man who spoke well on white privilege, and on the slippery slope from complaisance to complicity. I was genuinely interested in what he had to say. And it made me wonder about the general state of American Christians. Is that church I was in yesterday something far on the lefty fringe? Because to me, we'd be a lot better off if there were more church-goers of that ilk. But what I hear about, the Christians who are making waves, are the bible thumping haters, the abortion foes, the Muslim demonizers and the refugee rejectors, Kim Davis and Jerry Falwell and their fellow close-minded mean-spirited right-wing-nuts.

I can't begin to unpack this. But like I told my kid, the more you know, the better able you are to understand where someone else is coming from. Right? So I googled "christians in america" and ended up reading an interesting piece called "Are We Finally Witnessing The Death Of Christianity In America?".

The state of America is dismaying. But even so, the glass-half-full part of me wants to think that sanity will prevail and that we shall overcome.



Let's work together, let's have peace one day.

People Watching, N.Y.C.

​Big props to the young man getting off the subway with The Power Broker tucked under his arm. Excellent book. Ought to be required reading for anyone who lives in New York.


To the guy on a bike in the white helmet in the rain in the dark: I'm sorry. I didn't look. It was my fault. Thank you for not yelling at me when you bumped into me because it really was my fault. I'm glad neither of us got hurt, but if you'd yelled at me I probably would have burst into tears.

​
I want to apologize to the mother with a baby strapped to her chest. She was crossing the street, at a crosswalk, with the light, and my cabdriver yelled at her, complete with unnecessary profanity. I gave him a 28¢ tip, intending 20¢ but my finger missed the zero on the key pad. I also gave him a piece of my mind.


Morning commuter train to NYC. Pin-striped suit, snappy tie, braided leather suspenders ... and an unzipped fly. Yes, I told him. It was ruining his look.


Dude! I have to salute the guy with no elbows (or forearms or hands) and no knees (or lower legs or feet) riding a skateboard down Broadway, propelling himself with one leg and talking on a cellphone held to his ear with an arm.

I love that her scarf *almost* matches her laptop.

A photo posted by @magpiemusing on Jan 5, 2016 at 5:58am PST

Good looking guy with salt & pepper hair and beard, on the train in black sneakers, skinny black jeans, a black hoodie, and a snappy black motorcycle jacket. But the myriad zippered pockets weren't all zipped and they gapped unappealingly otherwise, ruining his look.


I'm waiting for the cross town bus on a blustery cold day and a guy arcs around the corner upright on a straight handlebarred bike, hands jammed in his jacket pockets. I wonder if it's the same guy I saw last spring.

The Bachelor

You know the Toast, right? The Toast is funny. The Toast has Mallory Ortberg writing things about refrigerators (yogurt never goes bad at her parent's house) and refrigerators (the only thing that belongs in there is mindfulness).

Not so long ago, she posted a list: Code Words For Spinster Throughout History. Oh that Katie Cloisterneck, she's a porch witch (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

And I remembered my grandmother.

Gigi, pronounced with two hard Gs, a toddler-mangling of Marie, was born in 1911. [Damn. She'd be 104 if she were still alive.] One year, my friend Peter came for Christmas. I think that might have been the year he showed up with prunes soaked in Armagnac and stuffed with foie gras. You know, a little nibble before dinner, as one does. Peter is a dear, and no one will ever take him for a straight man. So, Peter disappears into the kitchen to plate his stuffed prunes, and my grandmother leans over and says "so, he's a bachelor?"

I'd never heard it before, and I've never heard it since, but there it was: bachelor as code word for gay man.

True confessions

Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth at night, standing before the bathroom mirror, in my horizontally striped nightgown, I notice - to my chagrin and with the help of the lines - that one nipple is lower than the other.

I have a little twinge of regret every time I remember that when we packed up the hospital room when we were discharged after the girl's birth, I forgot to take the little card slotted into the clear plastic bassinet that read "baby girl" and so her files are incomplete.

My armpits never stink. That said, Trader Joe's deodorant? Does. Not. Work.

because I'm feeling sappy this evening

Several years ago, a friend - one of the semi-imaginary ones, someone I've met in person a few times, but a person I mostly know on-line - sent me a link to a poem. The subject of her email read: "because I'm feeling sappy this evening" and the poem was about sisters. It's titled "I wish I Had More Sisters" (and it's by Brenda Shaughnessy, and was in the New Yorker in 2010).

Here's the thing. It is wonderful to have friends and relatives. It is wonderful to call people on the telephone and to have them over for dinner and to swap plants with your next door neighbor. It's gratifying to send silly postcards and to mail books across the country. It's terrific to hang out with my sister and my sister-in-law getting my annual pedicure. It is grounding to have friends that you have known since 1977. But I feel, really, that my life is infinitely richer as a result of the many people - mostly women - I've had the chance to know since I started blogging and hanging out on Facebook. And that's the reason I held onto that email for so long - it's been in my inbox since 10/31/2010. That poem, and my friend's sentiment in sending it out to me and others, cemented that feeling of sisterhood, togetherness, "Each of us could be all of us."

Here's to a new year - full of friendship, sisterhood, connection and joy. And to finding forgotten gems when you clean out your inbox.

2015 = 79

Goodreads tells me that I read 79 books in 2015. I know that included in that total are five books that I abandoned because I just couldn't finish them. Included in that sub-list were biographies of Jerome Robbins and Bruce Springsteen, and a book of Leonard Bernstein's letters.

I also read 8 cookbooks, and if you're into the Great British Baking Show, I highly recommend Cakes (one of the River Cottage handbooks) - it's like it could be the text book. I've also been reading books about baking bread, mostly because I acquired a sour dough starter last year, and it needs to be used. I'm pretty good at maintaining the mother, but I need some handholding and inspiration to make the starter into bread. Getting there, though.

Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking has been the most useful, and is what helped me to that if-I-may-say-so-myself terrific loaf above. The Bien Cuit cookbook is GORGEOUS, inspiring and intimidating. All of the recipes require a big commitment of time, and some have a lot of weird ingredients. That said, I'll plunge in and try something. But in the meantime, I can enjoy the book as an art object - glossy black paint on the page ends makes it look almost like a lacquered box, and it has a lovely exposed binding. (I hope it holds up in the kitchen - it's almost too beautiful to handle with sticky, floury fingers.)

During the summer, I fell into a wormhole of Regency romances, by Georgette Heyer. They are delicious, and like eating peanuts, you kind of can't stop at one - I read seven:

Frederica
Sylvester
Venetia
Cotillion
Regency Buck
The Reluctant Widow
Cousin Kate

The Toll-Gate is still on my list but it's been out of the library every time I've checked.

Somehow, Georgette Heyer inspired me to re-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. If you're inclined, read them in order:

Whose Body? (1923)
Clouds of Witness (1926)
Unnatural Death (1927)
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
Strong Poison (1931) *
Five Red Herrings (1931)
Have His Carcase (1932)
Murder Must Advertise (1933) *
The Nine Tailors (1934)
Gaudy Night (1935) *
Busman's Honeymoon (1937) *

If you only want to read a few, read the ones that have an asterisk next to them. I mean, they're all great, but some are more great than others.

In the department of utterly delightful, I loved My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry. It's comic, anarchic, tragic, fantastic, eccentric, and wildly imaginative with a truly compelling voice.

In the graphic novel/memoir category, I read both of Alison Bechdel's books: Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Both stabbed me in the heart repeatedly, but two bits from Are You My Mother? stood out. First, when she asks "What's the main thing you learned from your mother?" and the answer is "That boys are more important than girls". I never asked my own mother that question, but I know that she thought her mother thought that girls were less than boys, that she was respected less than her brother.

And the teddy bear. I have that teddy, that very teddy. But when, because of old age and rough handling (but not by a dog), Teddy's felt palms and soles split open revealing the tightly packed wood shavings, my mother sewed on felt patches: my teddy was fixed, by my mother, and sits next to my bed atop the pile of unread books.

In non-fiction, I loved Skyfaring. It's a lovely and lyrical book about flying, by a pilot, chock full of history and physics and geography, rendered in a poetic and accessible manner.

And in the category of books that were far better than I expected, The Royal We was a delightful roman à clef about Wills and Kate. If your guilty pleasure is Go Fug Yourself's royalty coverage, you'll like it too.

Tart Shells are Round; or, The Kind of Circular Thinking In Which Nothing Is New

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, we were invited out to dinner. I offered to make a dessert, and planned to make the lemon tart from Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking, because every time I have made it, it's been perfect. And I love a lemon dessert. That tart calls for a pâte sablée crust, which is kind of like a sugar cookie and a great foil for the quite tart lemon custard filling. Alas, that day, the crust failed, epically. It cracked all over the place, and wouldn't even come out of the pan. I switched gears and made something else, but I still don't know why that pâte sablée didn't work.

For Thanksgiving dinner, I decided to make the cranberry curd tart that had been in the Times food section in a Thanksgiving round up. That recipe uses a hazelnut crust - a loose mix of ground hazelnuts pressed into the tart pan like you would a graham cracker crust. It was okay - the hazelnut crust was nice by itself, but we thought it competed indecorously with the cranberry filling.

Not being able to leave behind the failed pâte sablée, I did a bunch of googling. Butter in visible chunks? Butter thoroughly amalgamated with the flour? Somehow, I stumbled on a tart shell recipe on David Lebovitz's blog that blew all of that away - it was a 2009 recipe that started with a lump of butter and a splash of water and a spoonful of sugar, all dumped in a bowl and put in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Boiled butter! Then you add the flour. Intrigued, I had to try it. We'd been invited to a Boxing Day party so I thought I'd re-engineer the cranberry curd tart by putting it in Lebovitz's shell.

The crust is fascinating. It comes together almost like a roux, a wet looking ball of flour & butter, which you smush into a tart shell, gingerly because it's fiercely hot. It gets baked, while you make the curd, then both cool to room temperature. Then, you spoon the curd in the tart shell and bake it together for another 10 minutes. [Naturally, I wonder why everything has to be cooled down before that final run through the oven, but that's an experiment for another day.]

The boiled butter crust was delightful with the cranberry curd. A keeper, if you will. I decided that David Lebovitz was onto something.

Last night, I climbed into bed with a Christmas present: a copy of Food52 Genius Recipes. I wasn't reading it straight through, but jumping around looking for things that I need to make right now. You read cookbooks in bed, right? It's a compilation cookbook - 100 recipes from 100 sources - all alleged to be "the best". The reason I wanted the book is because there were enough recipes that I knew already, and knew to be good - the bar nuts from the Union Square Cafe, Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread, Kim Boyce's Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies, that butter & onion tomato sauce from Marcella Hazan, Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles. I figured with that kind of track record, there were probably other great recipes. I turned to page 236, curious about the "eggless lemon curd", because it sounds like a non-sequitur, eggs being pretty essential to curd, in my experience. [It uses agar, in case you're wondering.] But what to my wondering eyes turns up in the book, on page 235, as a vehicle for the lemon curd? "Brown Butter Tart Crust, from Paule Caillat" - in other words, the Lebovitz boiled butter crust. I confess to being both dumbfounded and even happier to have the cookbook in the first place.

There really is nothing new under the sun, is there?

Merry Christmas!

Half way through its decoration, the tree fell down. We wept, and swept up the broken ornaments. But their beauty cried out, so we spread them on a sheet and took a picture of the shattered yet ineffably lovely shards - honoring them in our remembrance.

All best wishes for a happy 2016, and may you too stop to note a moment of unexpected grace.

Perma Hedge, the cousin of fake Christmas trees

Do you know that there's a product out there called Perma Hedge? It's the green fuzzy plastic stuff that's supposed to make a chain link fence look like a perfect trimmed up evergreen hedge.

I don't know why I even know that, but whenever I drive by one, I need to sing out Perma Hedge.

I digress. I read a wonderful book recently, called My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry. It's comic, anarchic, tragic, fantastic, eccentric, and wildly imaginative with a truly compelling voice. And, circling back to Perma Hedge, there's a wonderful passage about Christmas trees:

Mum, of course, was very angry at Granny about the whole plastic tree thing, because she likes the smell of a real spruce tree and always said that the plastic tree was something Granny had duped Elsa about. Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who's heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In Miamas, spruce trees are living, thinking creatures with--considering that they're coniferous trees--an unaccountably strong interest in home design.

They don't live in the forest but in the southern districts of Miamas, which have become quite trendy in recent years, and they often work in the advertising industry and wear scarves indoors. And once every year, soon after the first snow has fallen, all the spruce trees gather in the big square below the castle and compete for the right to stay in someone's house over Christmas. The spruce trees choose the houses, not the other way round, and the choice is decided by a dance competition. In the olden days they used to have duels about it, but spruce trees are generally such bad shots that it used to take forever. So now they do spruce dancing, which looks a bit unusual, because spruce trees don't have feet. And if a non-spruce tree wants to imitate a dancing spruce tree, they just jump up and down. It's quite handy, particularly on a crowded dance floor.

Doesn't that make you wonder about the sentient quality of your Fraser fir, your blue spruce, your Scotch pine? Mine's been standing in the corner of the living room since Sunday, dark and naked, because I've not mustered the time or energy to drag the boxes of lights and ornaments out of the cellar. I imagine that the tree is feeling morose; it's contributing nothing to home design, and has been completely neglected since we winched it into its stand, not to mention the fact that it was brutally cut down and hauled miles away from its friends and neighbors.

If I keep this up, I'm going to be morose.

Here's to Christmas trees, decorated with abandon, redolent of pine, lit with love and little white lights.

See The Forest For The Trees

Back in 1988, I had a job at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was living in Manhattan, with my then boyfriend/now husband, and more often than not, I commuted back and forth to Brooklyn by car, because the BAM staff could park as cheaply as subway fare and my car lived on the street and was going to have to be moved for alternate side of the street parking anyway. And then there were those late nights when, in 1988, one did not want to take the subway home alone anyway, and cabs were expensive (but cheaper if you made the driver go over the Manhattan Bridge and up First Avenue, please, which they never wanted to do because the other way was both faster and longer and therefore more lucrative).

One of the productions in 1988 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL was a Robert Wilson/David Byrne shebang called The Forest - which was apparently based on the Epic of Gilgamesh but I can't remember a thing about it, although somewhere at home I have a hard bound program complete with a synopsis and photos and essays and (I think) a CD of some of the music. It matters not that I can't remember the show. What I remember very clearly is that the opening night performance was followed by a party on the Opera House stage.

The decor for the opening night was butt simple. It was December and Christmas trees had sprouted on every street corner in the city. Someone bought 25 big, skinny, fat, little Christmas trees, a stagehand nailed two pieces of 2x4 to the bottoms, and lo, a forest grew on the stage. We danced, we drank, we gloried in the performance. And at 2 in the morning, intrepid souls shouldered trees and took them home, the ultimate centerpiece.

I drove a little white Ford Fiesta then, a tiny hatchback. Someone helped me get my tree into the car - into, not on top - and I drove home from Brooklyn to Manhattan, perhaps less sober than I should have been. Happily, I found a parking space right near my apartment, and I muscled the tree out of the car, into the building, up the elevator, and into my apartment. My then boyfriend/now husband was duly startled when he stumbled out of bed the next morning and found a Christmas tree in the kitchen.

Origami tree at the American Museum of Natural History

Nowadays, we drive to the tree sale at the church in the next town, and tip the kid who helps tie the tree to the roof of the car. But somehow, the tree that stood on the opera house stage holds a sweet spot in my heart.

In Which I Clean Up My Desk, or, More Posts I Will Never Write

1)
The one about Alastair Macauley and his obsession with the dearth of male/male or female/female duets in classical ballet.

2)
The one about marriage, namely the case against. A part of my dark heart really really wonders what the point of marriage is. It just complicates things, what with inheritance laws, rights to visit loved ones in hospital, tax inequities.

3)
The one about Newton Arvin. Mostly I want to know why my mother ripped out a 1998 piece from the New Yorker, entitled The Scarlet Professor. Was it just because he'd been a professor at Smith when she was there? Was it the Truman Capote connection? Had she read the Melville biography?

Happy Thanksgiving!

May your turkeys be wild and your cranberries be juicy!

(Isn't that a nice image? Thank the British Library, and remember, if the Pilgrims hadn't run away from England, we wouldn't have Thanksgiving.)

Sunday Evening Core Dump

For our anniversary back in June, my sister-in-law gave us a pain de mie pan - loaf pan with a lid to make a soft-crusted sandwich bread that cuts up into perfectly square slices. I have been working on the bread ever since, with varying degrees of success. I didn't like the first recipe I tried. One day, the bread didn't quite rise into the corners, so the square slices weren't square. Once it was pretty close to perfect.

Today the bread failed spectacularly. The recipe calls for baking for 25 minutes with the lid on; you then remove the lid for another 5-10 minutes. The timer went off, I opened the oven, and discovered that the bread had forced the lid off the pan and knocked the whole thing on its side. Alas, I failed to get a picture of that carnage, being so stunned that I just closed the oven because I didn't have to take off the lid.

That bread was fierce! The only thing I can think that caused the break out is that I used bread flour instead of the specified all-purpose. You can be sure I will try it again; I am bound and determined to tame that recipe. And don't get me wrong - despite it being what my sister-in-law dubbed "a new and spectacular standard for ugly", a piece off the crusty end went nicely with my dinner soup.

---

There is something delightful about listening - on a chilly November day - to a song shot through with crickets.

---

In my spare moments I have been working on a unified theory of dessert. One of the people who is coming for Thanksgiving dinner said she would bring a French silk pie. Okay. Then another guest said she would bring a pumpkin pie. I sighed, not so much because I don't like pumpkin pie, but because it meant that we would have two desserts that were essentially the same - a pie crust filled with a brown custard. This is wrong, in the unified theory of dessert. One brown custard pie is fine. If there is a second dessert, it must be different. Gingerbread? Nantucket cranberry pie (which is really a cake)? Something other than a brown custard. But then the New York Times came out with a whole mess of ideas for Thanksgiving - including a cranberry curd tart.

Aha! In the unified theory of dessert, three open custard filled tarts, of different colors, is okay. So the hazelnut crust is in the freezer, and we will have pale brown French silk pie, a burnt sienna pumpkin pie, and a ruby red cranberry curd tart. And maybe I'll make a gingerbread, just for the hell of it.

Imperfect

The problem with used book sales is the sieve of a brain that completely forgets that one already owns that book.

Case in point:

I, buying the book for the cover, picked up a pristine paperback copy of Margaret of the Imperfections not so long ago. When I got home, it went in the stack of books to be read. It was duly read. [It was okay - a couple of the stories were excellent, one needs to be turned into a play, and the rest were unmemorable.] I took it downstairs to shelve it, in alphabetical order with all* of the other fiction in the house, and discovered that I ALREADY OWNED A COPY. Clearly I am imperfect, or my memory is.

Figuring that, given a choice, one should always keep the hardcover in lieu of the paperback**, I plucked the hardcover off the shelf just to see if it rang any bells. I certainly hadn't remembered reading it ever before, but opening it up, I found an inscription on the flyleaf.

Sigh.

I bought the book for my mother, for Christmas, in 1991. When we packed out her house, I took it home and shelved it. I wonder if she ever read it. Probably, it would have been unlike her not to, but I can't know anymore. But our books tell the stories that we've forgotten.



* Well, most. There are books in other rooms.
** And now that I have the hardcover, who wants the paperback? Raise your hand. I'm mailing the paperback to a friend named Margaret.

Matters of the Heart

Despite the fact that I have been known to rail about the lunacy of book logs for elementary school children, because they turn reading into a chore, into busy work, I have a deep and abiding love of keeping track of my own reading via GoodReads.

I mention this because I am 1) on a re-reading kick and 2) in a fallen-off-the-blog-wagon lull. In part, I make up for the lack of blog posts by micro posts on Facebook, and in tiny little "reviews" on GoodReads. Calling them reviews is a stretch of the imagination - it's more like a sentence or three to help me remember what I loved or liked or hated about a particular book.

Today, though, I finished a book and what I wanted to say was too weird and wide-ranging for GoodReads. And so, with that as preamble, let me tell you about the book I just re-read.

On Election Day in 2003, November 4th to be precise, an off year for elections, I moseyed over to the public school at which we voted. I know it was an off year, no presidents or senators to elect, but who was running and for what offices I have no idea. I can conjure up the horizontal beige tiles on the walls of the school stairway in my mind's eye, and I remember that the school's PTA was having their annual election day bake and book sale. Because I am incapable of walking past a pile of used books, I perused the stacks and came away with at least one book. Perhaps there were others; I can only remember the one. I am sure that I skipped the bake sale; as much as I like a cookie now and again, bake sales give me the heebie-jeebies: too many brownies made from box mixes.

On Election Day in 2003, I was almost 37 weeks pregnant.

On Election Day in 2003, the used book I bought at the election day sale was Walk On Water, by Michael Ruhlman. I bought it because I'd read other books by Ruhlman, about food and chefs, and I knew him to be a good writer. And the subtitle was intriguing: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit. There I was, pregnant as all get out - sure, a book about pediatric surgeons was just the right thing to be reading.

Not.

It terrified me. It's about pediatric CARDIAC surgeons - the doctors who do repairs of congenital heart defects, open heart surgery on tiny little children who have been born with holes between the ventricles, or transposed vessels, or hypoplastic left heart syndrome. I read it compulsively, thinking about the little tiny baby still residing in my belly, hoping everything was fine with her, that her heart was perfectly intact.

She was born less than a week later, and yes, her heart was fine. Still is, as far as I know.

I pulled Walk on Water off my bookshelf the other day, though, because one of my blogging friends - someone I actually met a whole lot of years ago at a BlogHer conference - has a baby who was born with a ventricular septal defect, and her baby was having open heart surgery last week. [The baby is fine, the surgery was successful.]

Walk on Water holds up on re-reading. It's really good. A lot of it is technical, but it's written with a layman's flair, like when he describes sewing tiny arteries together as like sewing Kleenex, with needle holders, without the tissue moving. Really, though, it's about people - what parents think about, what drives the surgeons and the OR nurses. In part, it's about health care - pointing out that procedures like repairing a tetralogy of Fallot - which happens in 3.9 births out of 10,000 - are best done by surgeons who do many of them, in hospitals who do lots of pediatric cardiology, and therefore it would make more sense for Ohio to have one pediatric heart center instead of five. In short, it's an excellent read. But you might want to skip it if you're pregnant.

A Short Story in Annoyance

I was going to write about ocean beaches and tides.

I was going to write about taking my daughter bra shopping.

Instead, I'm perplexed by something. Maybe I shouldn't be.

Even though some people might think I do, since I watch hardly any television and prefer the print edition of the New York Times, I don't actually live under a rock, and so recently I did see that the Pioneer Woman now has a line of housewares at Walmart. A picture flitted across my screen the other day and I was all like "what?". Because included in her pots and cups and lemonade dispensers and gaudy flowered plates were some glasses. Pretty embossed glass footed water goblets.

Pioneer Woman's glasses, at Walmart.

But the thing about these glasses? THEY AREN'T NEW! I've had a pair of exactly those water glasses for a few years - they're *my* wine glasses. Look here, I posted a picture of one of them on Instagram on July 10th:

Friday afternoon Nassau County Snacks.

A photo posted by @magpiemusing on Jul 10, 2015 at 4:14pm PDT

Is this what happens? Joe Schmo says "I want a line of housewares" for Walmart and they just go out and pick and choose already existing shite? Damn.

I tell you, I have nothing against Ree and Walmart making a buck, but man, I'm never looking at those glasses of mine the same way again.

Four Score

When I turn 80, throw me a party. Invite my friends, invite my family. Invite the neighbors from down the street, invite the painter and the real estate agent. Invite my step-daughter, and convince her to fly in from California for the weekend. Invite my secretary and tell the theater director that it's fine to bring the playwright along.

Hire a square dance caller, get a band. Don't be surprised when the fiddle player knows some of the guests. Convince everyone that they really can do the Virginia reel, even if they don't know left from right.

Find a BBQ joint that caters, but make extra salads for the vegetarians and for the people who want something other than baked beans. Put up a tent in the field, and fly bandanna prayer flags all around.

And don't be shy about asking people to help: she loves to bake, and she loves to order people around, and she's a whiz with a tomato salad in the heat of August. And she'll deliver a box of pimiento cheese sandwiches the day before, which you'll need, because you'll have forgotten to eat lunch.

Order me a birthday cake, but don't try and put 80 candles on it. And have some grab and go brownies (for the people who like chocolate) and lemon cake squares (for the ones who prefer something a little lighter). And late at night, after most of the guests have gone home, you'll move all of the candles to one table, and you'll sit there eating the homemade chocolate chip cookies that one of the guests brought, while you kill all the open bottles of wine.

Remember to take some pictures, but if you forget, other people will.

It'll be a blast.

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Lemon Cake Squares (from Moky's Black Book)

Ingredients

• 6 T. butter (3/4 stick or 3 ounces)
• 1 c. + 2/3 c. sugar (divided)
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 t. baking powder
• 1/4 t. salt
• 1/2 c. milk
• grated rind of one lemon
• juice of one lemon

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350F. 
2. Cream butter and 1 c. sugar. Stir in eggs. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt, and stir into creamed mixture. Add milk and lemon rind and mix until well combined.
3. Pour into a greased and floured 9" x 13" x 2" pan (or better yet, line the pan with a parchment sling). Bake at 350F for 25 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, combine lemon juice and remaining 2/3 c. sugar. Spoon over hot cake, and return to to the 350F oven for another 5 minutes. Cut into 1" or 2" squares while still warm.

Pie, Pie!

What you're going to say is that you don't bake. Or you don't know how to make pie crust. But it's easy! It just needs force of will. You want it, you make it.

The plums and the raspberries cried out "Pie, pie" this weekend at the farmer's market. We bought a bunch of little yellow and little red plums and a half pint of raspberries, and I came home and made some pie crust. Instead of a pie pie, it seemed to me that a galette would be better. And, it's easier! And it doesn't need a pie pan.

Just do it. Use the recipe I posted on this day in 2008. Use 2 cups of flour; you'll have extra dough which you will roll out, cut in strips, douse with cinnamon sugar, and eat like cookies as soon as they're out of the oven and cool enough to handle.

For the galette, roll out a rough 12" disk on a sheet of parchment - there's no need to worry about the edges, but try to make it more or less round. Transfer it to a baking sheet and trim back the parchment. Whack up some fruit into a bowl and toss it with a little sugar and some pie filling enhancer (a fabulous product from King Arthur). Dump the fruit into the middle of of your sheet of pastry and spread it out, leaving 2" clear at the edge. Fold the edge over and pleat it as needed to fit neatly into a rough circle. Dot the exposed fruit with butter and slam that baby in the oven. 40 minutes or so at 400°.

How hard was that?