I haven't been blogging much lately. Shame on me but things have been pretty busy around these parts. This Saturday was my monthly book club meeting and it was lots of fun. The Italian says we should rename it to drink club with a side of book because we always end up talking about the book for all of 5 minutes and spend the rest of the night eating and drinking wine and/or beer. Well, wine for me anyhow. It's always so much fun! So this last months book was "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World" by Eric Weiner. I really enjoyed this book. I won't write a review here but I will recommend it. It's a light read and full of humor. It's very enlightening and great for lovers of travel as well as for those that haven't ventured very far but would like a perspective on the world as someone else sees it. You can read about it here.
I baked a Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Chip bread and it was a huge success! My friend Claire's husband did a dance for me just after his first bite :-)
Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Chip bread recipe:
Ingredients:
3 cups sugar 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1/2 cup apple sauce 4 eggs, lightly beaten 1 can solid pack pumpkin 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 1/2 cup of water 3 tablespoons Canadian maple syrup 1/2 bag of semisweet chocolate chips
Optional: substitute chocolate chips for walnuts or use both!
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl combine sugar, oil, applesauce and eggs. Add pumpkin and mix well.
Combine dry ingredients; add to the pumpkin mixture alternately with water.
Pour into two greased loaf pans, or one loaf pan and one cupcake pan, or one bundt cake pan...etc, many possibilities!
Bake for 60 to 65 minutes or until the bread tests done. Drizzle maple syrup over the top when just out of the oven. Cool in pans for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Personally, I like to slice into it while it's still warm and add a dallup of Cool Whip!
Sorry there's no pic of the bread sliced. I didn't take my camera with me to book club but I am sure I will make it again really soon, so perhaps I'll post some pics then. Plus my photographer is in Milano so with only two hands it was hard to stop and take a pic so I just used the point & shoot.
My friend Sarah invited me to join her book club and of course I graciously accepted. The first meeting was Friday night and the book for that meeting was Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. Not normally a book I would pick up on my own but I'm an open-minded person, so why not, right? I'm actually not done with it yet. It was a little hard to get into at first, but now it's got my interest. In a nutshell, it's about a woman who is transgender, although she hasn't had the surgery, it's more about her identity. She really goes through a lot in her life and it's really terrible the way transgendered people are treated. Although this is a work of fiction, it really is quite obviously a memoir.
The other women in the book club are really cool and the hostess's husband was an absolute riot, so I had a great time!
For the book club we are all to bring a dish or dessert and wine. I decided to bring my "famous" Sugared Walnuts. They were a big hit! (Further proving the Italian's theory that I am a golosa!) So I'm going to post the recipe here for you all. These are great for the holidays or sporting events like the Superbowl, or even just to munch on while watching a good flick. NOTE: You can use any kind of nut you like, as long as it's not a nut that burns easily, i.e. pecans.
SUGARED WALNUTS Ingredients:
2 cups sugar 1 cup water 4 cups shelled walnuts (approx. 1 bag) 2 tablespoons of cinnamon 1/4 of a stick of butter 2 tablespoons of vanilla (if you can, use the Mexican kind, it's just better!)
Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. In a medium size pot over medium heat, combine the sugar, water, cinnamon, butter, vanilla and dissolve.
Add the walnuts and continue cooking,
Stirring frequently until the walnuts are completely sugar coated and the sugar is crystallized and there is no syrup left.
Pour the mixture onto an ungreased cookie sheet, spreading and separating the walnuts as much as possible.
Bake until the walnuts are golden, about 12 to 15 minutes, stirring at 5 minute intervals.
Let them sit for a few minutes to allow them to harden.
And voila'! The finished product! They are so good while they are still warm...yum!
Please note that I doubled the recipe, so it looks like a lot in the pics but you won't have as much if you stick to the recipe I posted.
Our next meeting for the book club is on December 5th and the book is Flight by Sherman Alexie. I'm so looking forward to it!
Are you a member of a book club? What are you reading?
Saturday I had to drive out to Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, to pick up some pants I was having altered by a seamstress. She told me last week that she was going to be home all day so I could stop by anytime on Saturday. As luck would have it, she was not home when I arrived. I called her cell phone and she told me she was out running errands and wouldn't be home until 3:30pm. It was now 12:30pm. Great. Lesson learned. I should have called before I went. I didn't want to have to drive back to Portland and back again, so I remembered that there was a movie theater nearby. There are a few movies I've been wanting to see but the only one starting when I arrived at the theater was "Righteous Kill", the DeNiro/Pacino movie. All the others had already started, so "Righteuos Kill" it was. This movie was just ok, not their greatest body of work. It was a bit predictable. The Italian would have probably liked it more than me as this is his kind of movie and he is a DeNiro fan. When the movie ended, I still had an hour to kill, so I headed over to Barnes & Noble.
Normally, in terms of buying books, I scout out the book at Barnes or Powell's(Powell's deserves it's own post and that will be coming soon), then I come home and order the books that interest me from amazon.com. Unless Powell's has a used version. So when I went to Barnes, there was quite the display for this book called "Twilight". Being artistically inclined, I'm a sucker for a good display. I was intrigued. So I picked up the book and kind of thumbed through it. Seemed pretty good, so I wrote it down on my list of books to scout out on Amazon. Now I have to tell you that this book is about a love story between a vampire and a normal girl. Not normally a subject I like to read about, vampires. I like books that transport me to another place, and perhaps another time, but I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in the day, so I thought, why not? Plus, it is listed as a young adult book, but there were some older women talking about how they loved the book. I'm such a sucker, I know, I know. Some of the other books that interest me are "The Bastard of Istanbul" and "The Flea Palace" by Elif Sharak.
So when I got home and started researching this book, which is actually the first in a series, I was sort of thrown for a loop when I found out that this book has like this total cult following all over the world. It's been on the NY Times bestseller list like forever, it's been translated to over 20 languages and there's a movie coming out in November AND it was filmed right here, in Portland, Oregon. Where the hell have I been??? People have created websites dedicated to this series of books and they are traveling to the litte town of Forks, Washington where the story takes place. I'm not normally one to "jump on the bandwagon" but all of this really has me intrigued, so I am going to order the book from Amazon. I checked the library website to see if it was available and the system has 89 copies with 471 holds on this book. Insane. I want to read it before the movie comes out, so I'm not willing to put my name on a waiting list of 471 people. After I finish reading the book, which may take a while because I have a lot of other reading to do for school, I will post my review. Off to order my book!
