The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

I listened to this YA book that is on the Reese Witherspoon recommended reading list, and very much enjoyed it. Jo Kuan is a heroine that you can feel good about rooting for. She is a foundling who has many talents but many limitations placed upon her. Almost everything about her happens in hiding, and she is someone who should shine. When the book opens she is less than thrilled to be back working as a lady’s maid after being unceremoniously fired from her job as a milliner’s assistant – but she needs the work, and there aren’t many professional opportunities for a poor girl of Asian descent in 1890s Atlanta. Her adoptive father, Old Gin, isn’t as young as he used to be, and they can’t live on his wages alone. The only bright side is her new anonymous position as a newspaper advice columnist, Miss Sweetie, counseling Atlanta’s young and fashionable on the most important topics of the day. Her progressive takes on everything from segregated streetcars to bicycles and women’s suffrage make the column a huge success, but the more Jo speaks Miss Sweetie’s mind, the more the city clamors for her identity to be revealed. At the same time, she knows Old Gin is hiding something from her, and Jo suspects it might have something to do with her real parents. Finding out the truth could mean sacrificing both her anonymity and her steady income, not to mention her and Old Gin’s safety. The book unwinds at an enjoyable pace to an equally fine ending.

Coronation Coleslaw

I am always on the hunt for a new coleslaw recipe! I love a cabbage salad, of just a salad that has cabbage shredded into it. We are entering the season of locally grown greens and this is a nice additional side to a green salad. This comes from the ever reliable The Kitchn website, which you should also check out. FOR THE DRESSING: 2/3 cup regular or vegan mayonnaise 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 4 teaspoons curry powder 1 tablespoon honey 2 teaspoons onion powder 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper FOR THE SLAW: 1/2 medium head green cabbage (about 1 1/4 pounds) 1/2 medium head red cabbage (about 3/4 pound) 1 large carrot (about 5 ounces) 1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons golden raisins, divided 1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons salted, roasted cashews Kosher salt MAKE THE DRESSING: Place 2/3 cup mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar, 4 teaspoons curry powder, 1 tablespoon honey, 2 teaspoons onion powder, 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, and 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper in a large bowl and stir to combine. MAKE THE SLAW: Prepare the following, adding each to the bowl of dressing as it is completed: Cut the core from 1/2 medium head green cabbage, then thinly slice until you have 4 cups. Repeat with 1/2 medium head red cabbage until you have 3 cups. Peel and grate 1 large carrot on the large holes of a box grater (about 1 cup). Add 1 1/4 cups of the golden raisins and stir to combine, making sure the coleslaw is evenly dressed. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour to let the flavors meld. Before serving, add 1 1/4 cups of the salted, roasted cashews and toss to combine. Taste and season with more kosher salt as needed. Transfer the coleslaw to a serving bowl. Sprinkle with the remaining 2 tablespoons golden raisins and 2 tablespoons cashews.

Shiloh: A Requiem

Best known as the author of Moby-Dick, Melville was also a talented poet. This work is a meditation on a major battle from the Civil War. Skimming lightly, wheeling still, The swallows fly low Over the field in clouded days, The forest-field of Shiloh— Over the field where April rain Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain through the pause of night That followed the Sunday fight Around the church of Shiloh— The church so lone, the log-built one, That echoed to many a parting groan And natural prayer Of dying foemen mingled there— Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) But now they lie low, While over them the swallows skim, And all is hushed at Shiloh.

VanDusen Botanical Gardens, Vancouver, British Columbia

Essondale (now the Riverview Psychiatric Hospital in Coquitlam) is the site of the earliest botanical garden in Canada, started by “Botany John” Davidson, the provincial botanist. He moved the botanical garden to the new UBC campus in 1916, where it remains to this day. This gorgeous botanical garden had a humble beginning, and let that be a lesson to us all--things can be transformed, you just have to have a vision, and a lot of luck, money, and zoning. This started as part of the railroad, then in 1912 it became a golf course. I do not know if it is true, but there are some large swaths of grass remaing, and maybe they linger from that time.

Roy Forster was the garden’s curator from 1977-1996; he oversaw the planting of 12,000 trees, flowers and shrubs representing 3,072 species. During excavation, workers discovered sea shells — evidence that the land had been under the ocean about 12,000 years ago. In 1999, Forster received the Order of Canada in recognition of his work in designing the VanDusen gardens

South To America by Imani Perry

The subtitle of this book is A Journey Below The Mason-Dixon Line To Understand The Soul Of A Nation. The author is black, southern born and northern raised, so when she goes about exploring the south, town by town, and region by region, she does so with a different perspective than some and with an eye to telling a story of what the past, present, and the potential future that each place has, and how it all fits together. She starts in Appalachia, the remote mountainous region that spans from Mississippi to New York, and touches 10 Southern states. She visits Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where white abolitionist John Brown attempted a slave revolt in 1859 and paid for it with his life. She has a mixed mission, the first to experience and portray each place at it is today and to provide the historical perspective, but also to take these and look at where the near future will be, which is nowhere near the same as she moves from place to place, and she struggles to try and tie it all together. It is more textured a portrayal than lumping everything below the Mason Dixon line together. Northern popular opinion has it that Southerners are fat, poor, and uneducated. Statistics will tell you they are politically conservative and reactionary. History has it that they are racist and violent. While there is some truth to those assessments, they don’t come close to painting an accurate or helpful picture of the South, which is much more complex, multifaceted, and contradictory--and she posits that we had better figure it out or we too are doomed to repeat the past.

Blue Water Cafe, Vancouver, British Columbia

I had a wonderful trip to Vancouver that included a meal at this fabulous seafood restaurant (there are several things on the menu that are either plant based, or contain land animals, but the only reason to go here to have them is if everyone in your party wants out of this world seafood and you are the accomodating sort). They hace a renowned sushi menu, which I would have delved into if I had been dining with my spouse, but we stuck to the other parts of the menu, and were not disappointed. Pictured is their appetizer sampler, which is repleat with delectable choices, and then we had the catch of the day and scallops, both of which were cooked perfectly and accompanied by delicious sauces and falvorful vegetables. This is a must go to restaurant in a happening area downtown. Added bonus was that we could walk to it from where we were staying.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

This author is always entertaining, whether it be serious fiction (as this is) or more of a crime drama, she is fun to read. Her work set in or around this time period tends to be a bit darker, some would say Dickensian, where you are anxiously worried about an impending disaster, but that largely doesn't happen much here. This is a sprawling and sparkling tale set in London in 1926, overrun with flappers, gangsters, shilling-a-dance girls, disillusioned veterans of the Great War, crooked coppers, a serial killer (so some bad things happen), absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways, snazzy roadsters and a bevy of people with hope and promise but not much in the way of common sense. The figure at the center of this particular metropolitan web is a tough entrepreneur named Nellie Coker who presides over an empire of sin. Her string of five nightclubs stretches from the classy Amethyst to the low brow Sphinx. In the Author’s Note, Atkinson identifies the now largely forgotten Irishwoman Kate Meyrick, the “Night Club Queen” of Soho, as the real-life inspiration for Nellie and her brood of mostly adult children who help run the clubs. She goes to jail at one point, and spends the rest of the story figuring out who ratted her out, and she takes us along for the ride.

Asian-ish Vegetable Salad

For spring, and the beginning of the local fresh vegetable season! 3tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 2tablespoons lime juice 1tablespoon fish sauce 1tablespoon minced shallot ½teaspoon minced garlic 1bird’s eye or serrano chile, thinly sliced Kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal) and pepper 8ounces asparagus, trimmed, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced at an angle 4ounces cherry tomatoes, halved 3cups thinly sliced mixed vegetables (such as carrots, radishes and cucumbers) ½cup cilantro leaves and tender stems, coarsely chopped In a large bowl, combine oil, lime juice, fish sauce, shallot, garlic and chile; season with salt and pepper. Whisk well. Add the asparagus, tomatoes and other mixed vegetables and season with salt and pepper. Toss to evenly coat and let stand at room temperature for 5 minutes, tossing occasionally. Fold in cilantro and serve.

The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

I very much enjoyed this biography of Samuel Adams, who was born into a prosperous family in 1722 in the city state of Boston. Adams could afford to attend and graduate from Harvard, but he squandered his inheritance before becoming Boston’s most inept tax collector. Elite education developed his mastery of words while downward mobility cultivated his empathy for working people — and his rage against men of fortunes, privileges and luck. He especially hated a fellow Bostonian, Thomas Hutchinson, who grew ever richer and more powerful by acquiring multiple offices, including chief justice of the superior court and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts — until Adams ruined his popularity with insidious rumors. Both sides crafted conspiracy theories. A lot of time is spent of Adams explaining why he felt unfairly dealt with. While Adams claimed that British leaders plotted to ruin colonial prosperity and freedom, Loyalists depicted Boston’s radicals as conspiring to dupe common people into wreaking anarchy. Adams became Boston’s leading revolutionary, rallying that seaport to resist Parliament’s taxes and reject British rule. Unlike his cousin John Adams, Samuel cared more about swaying men behind the scenes than about taking credit for posterity. Slipping in and out of backrooms, he seemed to manage every protest, riot, election and newspaper diatribe. His many friends recalled Adams as a selfless hero utterly devoted to liberty. His many enemies defined him as a reckless and deceitful incendiary. Adams left us too sparse a paper trail to find a deeper character between the polarized accounts, burning most of his letters lest they implicate friends in treason. Ironically, as the financially strapped Adams, he inherited the lowest rung on the family business ladder, and it is why he is widely known today.

San Diego Bird Festival

There I was, in the middle of an atmospheric river-something that sounds so lovely and is really a climate catastrophe, trying my hand at birding for the first time. The women who invited me, very good life long friends, called and said maybe I shouldn't come, that birds don't care for high wind and torrential rain, but I had committed. I was doing what Mel Brooks reccommended, I was trying out potential post-retirement hobbies while I was still active enough and with a full time salary to support me, and birding held a lot of appeal for me. It got you outdoors, looking for things in all sorts of natural places, and learning more about them. Despite the weather we saw a couple hundred different kinds of birds over the course of three days. I discovered that birders are generally very kind and willing to share what they know. I found out that with a good pair of binoculars I, too, could spot birds and in the end, I decided I would happily do this all over again.

Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close

The novel is set in a family-run restaurant called Sullivan’s and is told from the vantage point of three different grandchildren--Teddy, Jane, and Gretchen-- to restaurant owner Bud Sullivan, who dies at the outset of the book. They have each left the family business, gone out on their own, had failed relationships and careers, and come back to the restaurant. Their stories are engaging, if occasionally annoying, and they move forward even when it is hard to do so. The tone is set by the title--which is explained as the practice of upending one partially emptied ketchup bottle onto another so as to fill one of them. No longer done, but that is the lightness that flows through the book. It is both humorous and sad, playful yet touching, and should be the sort of easy read that might be best enjoyed at the beach on a warm, summer day.

Quantumania (2023)

This movie just makes me feel old--which is ironic, because there are actors in this that have high name recognition and are older than me, but there it is. Also, it makes me a bit sad, since the Antman movies are the piece of the Marvel universe that I have liked the best. Without much in the way of a preamble, Antman and and his daughter Cassie are warped into a quantum-level universe. Nearly the entire story takes place in the Quantum Realm, a bizarre place where beings have broccoli for heads and they use flying mitochondria for transportation. While there’s plenty of never-before-seen sci-fi stuff to absorb (no doubt we will need it in order to have a hope of keeping up in the next marvel installation), there is seemingly no rhyme or reason behind any of it, so it all feels like computer-generated window dressing that has no bearing on events taking place. I was not a big fan.

The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev

First of all, I love Mindy Kaling, and this is one of just two (at this moment) books that she is recommending--she launched this effort to elevate diverse authors that present non-mainstream western culture stories and backgrounds, and I look forward to reading the things that she puts her stamp of approval on. This is a three-generation Indian women rom-com. All of whom lose or have lost the men in their lives, and who support each other. Bindu Desai is the grandmother, and when she inherits a million dollars, she’s astounded―and horrified. The windfall threatens to expose a shameful mistake from her youth. On an impulse, Bindu quickly spends it on something unexpected: a condo in a posh retirement community in Florida. The impulsive decision blindsides Bindu’s daughter-in-law, Aly. At forty-seven, Aly still shares a home with Bindu even after her divorce from Bindu’s son. But maybe this change is just the push Aly needs to fight for her own dreams? It is a start, and then she gets a big shove. As Bindu and Aly navigate their new dynamic, Aly’s daughter, Cullie, is faced with losing the business that made her a tech-world star. The only way to save it is to deliver a new idea to her investors―and they want the dating app she pitched them in a panic. Problem is, Cullie has never been on a real date. Together these three women find a way to new visions of themselves and each other and it is a joy ride to read.

Savannah Cotton Exchange

It is very hard for me to be in the American South and to enjoy the history around me because so much of it is tied directly to slavery. This building was built in 1887, so after the Civil War, and was embarked upon because Savannah was the leading exporter of cotton in the United States and second in the world. Prior to the Revolutionary War, cotton was imported from the West Indies through trade within the British Empire, which decreased after America gained independence and tried to achieve economic autonomy. The need to find industries to support Georgia’s economy after the war was the first catalyst pushing cotton towards becoming a major Georgia crop. Georgians found that long-staple cotton fibers could easily be separated from its seeds, but it only grew on the coast. Short-staple cotton grew inland but separating the seeds from the fibers was labor intensive, increasing the cost of production. The patent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1794 allowed cotton plantations to spread further from the coast to grow short staple cotton. The lucrative cash crop also increased the heavy dependence on slave labor by cotton-producing states and directly tied those states to the slave economy. The cotton gin became popularized just before the Creek War, which resulted in a massive loss of Creek Indian lands in western Georgia and Alabama. The Creek’s loss of land allowed more people to venture west and become part of Georgia’s profitable cotton industry by managing their own cotton plantations (that were heavily dependent on enslaved labor) in the newly acquired lands. Soon settlers began turning their sights to northern Georgia, where the Cherokee Indians resided, setting the stage for Georgia’s, and the cotton industry’s, expansion into northern regions of Georgia. So cotton was emblematic of both financial success and subjugation.

The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa

This book is short and very sweet. On the one hand it is a book full of math. The professor is a professor of number theory. He has been in a car accident and sustained a head injury which leaves him unable to work and in need of full time care, but he is still a mathematician. Numbers are a fundamental building block of our universe; and number theory is about discerning the fundamental truths about numbers. Numbers are both a motif throughout the novel as well as a way for the professor to relate to his housekeeper. She is more than willing to meet him where he is at, and to learn from him. She takes him seriously, and she cares for him. For a math professor with an eighty minute memory, his only tangible connection to the world around him is numbers. Numbers are how he managed to find meaning in a world that only exists for eighty minutes, and it is how he makes connections with people he does not remember and will not remember. The housekeeper and the professor treat mathematics and numbers, as well as life in all it's meaning, with all of the beauty and reverence they deserve.

Low Country Local Cuisine

Georgia is really lovely in April, even when it is storming. Not often too hot and humid (avoid the sun at midday, of course, but it is more managable than even a month later--like now), lots of beaches on the barrier islands (although they are washing away), and lots of birds everywhere. All of that is lovely, but the thing that I enjoyed most about my recent trip below the Mason Dixon line on the Atlantic Coast was things that came out of the water.

I loved the local shrimp, which I had every which way, and the grouper--a fish that is rarely on the menu in the landlocked place I live most of the time. My traveling companions really enjoyed the oysters as well, and the thing about these exceptional local ingredients is that where you eat becomes less important because you are eating local food prepared in the usual way.

The only exception to this was the grits--during the pandemic I made so many things that I used to only eat out, and shrimp and grits was one of them. In the aftermath of the public killing of George Floyd, I turned to Toni Tipton Martin's cookbook, Jubilee, and made foods that black Americans have made for centuries, and shrimp and grits is one dish that I make just perfect for me, and I did not ever have great grits when compared to mine. Otherwise, I was satisfied.

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

The former first lady is a charming woman whose personality comes through loud and clear in her writing. She is not the best memoir writer, but she is an engaging one, so much so that I will certainly read her next book should there be one. This is a how-to book. She learned to cope with the various ways that people belittle others and express their hatred from her parents, and the lessons are wise and generalizable. She felt like she stuck out (she was the tallest person in her class for a very long time) and that she was unliked. She gives a great example about not wanting to go to math class because her teacher didn't like her. Her mother advised that the teacher has a lot of math to teach and she had a lot of math to learn, so go to class to get math and come home to be liked. This is a practical guide to help us all learn to cope with adversity, be it prejudice, a pandemic or the chilling thought of Donald Trump re-entering the White House. In Obama’s words, the aim is to give readers a “glimpse inside my personal toolkit” – the strategies she uses to be “more comfortable, less paralyzed, inside of uncertainty”. The book contains 10 of these techniques, ranging from “starting kind” through to “the whole of us”. Miraculously, these self-help bromides don’t come across as cloying, mainly because Obama is so disarmingly honest about her fears, failures, and all-too human flaws. In the end it is a book about how to cope with the vitriol flung from the far right. I would point out that those people have to live with all that rage, and the rest of us do not. This is a way to walk away and feel good about it.

Close (2022)

This movie depends on you not knowing too much about it when you watch it, making a review harder to write. This is a beautifully crafte dand overall remarkable film with exquisitely modulated performances by non-actors in the lead roles, and imagery that will make you want to spend a month in the Belgian countryside. The story is about two families and more specifically about two boys. Léo and Rémi both grew up on small farms worked by their families. They ride their bikes to and from school every day, and at the end of a workday, one will often go over to the other's house for dinner and to sleep over. They have an easy closeness that works well with their families, who are also close, but when one of them is bullied at school and the other becomes a bit more popular, the way of their closeness changes. It is inevitable and also sad--the way that toxic masculinity shapes the behavior of the next generation on playgrounds around the world. This one is a quiet handling of all of that, with very realistic lack of communication and exploration of feelings. I think all of the nominees in the best International Film catagory in 2023 were very good, this one included.

Dr. No by Percival Everett

This comes out as the Bond thriller of the same name turns sixty. While some might celebrate with fast cars, shaken, not stirred martinis, and a heaping dose of toxic masculinity, that is not how this author rolls. Instead, he writes a book that is much ado about nothing. The narrator is a 36-year-old deadpan Black man who is on the autism spectrum and goes by the name Wala Kitu. His first name is Tagalog for “nothing”; his last name is Swahili for “nothing.” Now, as a distinguished mathematics professor at Brown University, Wala knows that nothing + nothing = nothing. In fact, Wala is the world’s greatest expert on nothing. He’s spent his career searching for nothing. “I have not found it,” he confesses. “I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.” The story chugs along with more jokes and double entendres about nothing than you can imagine (and I suspect I might have missed quite a few!), and while it is not exactly my cup of tea, it is well written and clever and unforgettable.

Solare Ristorante, San Diego

I was in San Diego for the birding festival, and on the very last day, after our last morning of guided birding and before I was to be dropped at the airport, we stopped here for lunch. It is a Michelin Bib Gourmande restaurant, which means that it is well prepared food that is a good value, and I would say that fits. I was traveling with a vegetarian for whom the most successful cuisines that overlap for us are Italian and Mexican. There was a limited menu for her, but she was happy with the choice and the two of us who eat seafood were very happy. The arancini were spectacular--but limited in number! This made me want to make them at home, so I could eat as many as I would like, and the cost would be modest. They make their own pasta, so that is a must as well. The ambiance is fine, but the food is really excellent, and if you want a restaurant that is both good and a stone's throw from the airport, this is a good bet.

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild

This was a painful book to read because it demonstrates quite clearly that the MAGA faction is merely rearing its ugly head again rather than created out of whole cloth--which of course is not really news so much as a reminder, but when it happened 100 years ago it was far worse than what we have endured to date. What’s normal in our past is the American vulnerability to mythical enemies, demagogues and ignoramuses. These dangerous forces abounded in the years Hochschild describes, from 1917 to 1921. World War I is what defined the era. For the European powers involved in that killing spree, the war began in 1914, but an isolationist America remained aloof until April 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson finally declared war on Germany and its allies. Seventeen months later, after millions of American doughboys had taken up arms in Europe and 117,000 were killed, the Germans surrendered. The nation’s delayed entry to the war stimulated intrigue and violence in the United States that set Americans sympathetic to Germany and those sympathetic to our traditional allies in Britain and France at odds. Wilson at first sought to stand apart from the propagandizing on both sides, and he waged a 1916 reelection campaign on the ultimately misleading slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” In 1917, when the Germans began indiscriminate submarine warfare in the Atlantic that sank American ships, Wilson went all in for war. Wilson is the bad guy in this tale. He is also one of the most complex, contradictory figures in American history. Raised in Augusta, Ga., by a family that supported the Confederacy, Wilson clung to a Southern segregationist’s ugly racial views all his life. The first and last holder of a PhD to occupy the White House, he was the president of Princeton University before becoming governor of New Jersey in 1911. As governor and then as president (elected in 1912), he was a progressive reformer on economic issues and an internationalist. But once he led America into war, he became a dedicated jingoist He signed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, two laws that allowed restrictions on freedom of speech that were draconian by today’s standards. Once America joined the war effort, Wilson had no apparent qualms about imprisoning dissident Americans, including the Socialist Party candidate who had run against him for president in 1912 and won 6 percent of the vote, Eugene V. Debs. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a speech in 1918 that the Wilson administration interpreted as discouraging participation in the war. The list of his shortcomings goes on and on, but suffice it to say that Debs could run for president from jail, and so could another past president.

Chicken With Broccoli

I got this off the WOks of Life website, and enjoyed it, as much as I enjoy this as a takeout option--the only change I would make is upping the cornstarch a bit, but my husband would have liked more umami, so maybe a stronger oyster sauce or more of it, and some fish sauce standing in for some of the soy sauce. 12 ounces boneless skinless chicken breast (or thighs, 340g) ▢3 tablespoons water (45 ml) ▢1 tablespoon oyster sauce ▢1 teaspoon cornstarch ▢1 1/2 teaspoons vegetable oil FOR THE REST OF THE DISH: ▢2/3 cup low sodium chicken stock (160 ml, warmed) ▢1 1/2 teaspoons sugar (or brown sugar) ▢1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce ▢2 teaspoons dark soy sauce ▢1 tablespoon oyster sauce ▢1 teaspoon sesame oil ▢1/8 teaspoon white pepper ▢4 cups broccoli florets (300g) ▢3 tablespoons vegetable oil (divided) ▢2 cloves garlic (minced) ▢1/4 teaspoon fresh ginger (grated, optional) ▢1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine ▢2 tablespoons cornstarch (mixed with 2 tablespoons water to form a cornstarch slurry) Start by marinating your chicken. In a bowl, add the sliced chicken, 3 tablespoons water, 1 tablespoon oyster sauce, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, and 1 ½ teaspoons vegetable oil. Rub the marinade ingredients into the chicken with your hands until all the liquid has been absorbed by the chicken. Set aside for 10 minutes. Next, prepare the sauce mixture. In a small bowl or measuring cup, add the warm chicken stock, sugar, soy sauce, dark soy sauce , oyster sauce, sesame oil and white pepper. Stir everything together until well combined and set aside. Boil water in your wok and blanch the broccoli for 1 minute (or 2 minutes if you like your broccoli softer). Drain and set aside. Clean and dry your wok. Place it over high heat until smoking. Add 2 tablespoons vegetable oil and sear the chicken until opaque on all sides (this shoul d only take about 3 minutes). Turn off the heat, remove the chicken, and set aside. The chicken will be about 90% done, but will be cooked again at the end. Without washing the wok, set the flame to medium heat. Add another tablespoon of oil, along with the garlic and ginger (if using). Stir the garlic and ginger for 5 seconds and add the Shaoxing wine around the perimeter of the wok. Then pour in the sauce mixture. Use your wok spatula to stir the sauce around the sides of the wok to deglaze, and let it come to a simmer. Stir up the cornstarch and water slurry and drizzle the mixture into sauce while stirring constantly. Allow the sauce to simmer for 10 to 15 seconds until thick and gravy-like. Toss in the chicken and its juices and the blanched broccoli. Stir-fry until the chicken and broccoli is coated in the sauce. At this point, you can make adjustments. If you like your brown sauce darker, add a dash more of dark soy sauce. Add more cornstarch slurry if your sauce is too thin, or more chicken stock or water if the sauce is too thick. Serve with steamed rice.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

This is the first thing that I have read by this author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, and is best know for her personal memory works. I liked it but I did not love it, and I could not relate to it. That is unusual for me, as at least part of the pleasure for me in reading a memoir is in how it gets me to reflecting on my personal experience, and how does the author's thoughts and happenings interweave--or not--with me and my experiences. This is the focus of this work: in 1988, she went on a junket to Soviet Russia. On the last day of the tour, in then Leningrad, she began an affair with a married Russian diplomat from the Soviet embassy in France. He was 35; she was 48. When they returned to Paris they kept it up. This is the billed as the unaltered, original journal of her obsession that she wrote during their 18 months together.

Cast Iron: Cookware or Weapon

We tried to carry this frying pan onto our flight when we last went to our short term rental. We are trying to make the kitchen almost as equipped as our home kitchen and a good cast iron frying pan is one such piece of making that happen. It did not make it, though, because TSA sees a frying pan as a weapon. It is not that I cannot see that a frying pan of this heft could harm someone. I definitely get that. What I don't understand is how these decisions are made. It is likely to be based more on convenience than safety alone. A laptop can definitely be a weapon--when there have been issues with passengers over the past 20 years, the weapon weilded most is laptops. So much more effective than hand to hand combat for the majority of us. It is just impractical to have everyone check their laptop, and a weight limit is also going to slow things down at security checkpoints. So we will need to bring it when we are checking luggage, but oh that we would treat guns in our communities with the same scrutiny we give to frying pans going on airplanes.

The Old Woman With The Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo

This is not your usual assassin story--although there are some movies that have aging spies and contract killers who continue to pull of jobs, this one features a diminutive knife wielding woman. Hornclaw is a 65-year-old woman working for an agency that specializes in ‘disease control’, she has a set of knives concealed in her coat, and her skill is in dispatching each target with a quick jab as quietly and conveniently as possible. But Hornclaw is starting to feel her age and the agency she works for is now corporately run, and she wonders if she’ll be retired. She knows the end is near when she spares someone's life who can identify her, and then she becomes interested in his family as well. She has softened involuntarily and sees it is time to change her ways. A great deal of the story deals with the theme of ageing, how we cope with the past and how life changes over time. From the opening scenes, there are vignettes throughout in which Hornclaw and other elderly Korean folk are ignored, overlooked or outright mistreated by younger people. Beware of gray haired knife wielding women, for so many reasons.

Ahime, Bologna, Italy

This is a Bib Gourmande restaurant in Bologna that serves imaginative regional cuisine with a careful focus on seasonal, sustainably produced ingredients. Many of the items on the menu, which changes often if not daily, were also vegetarian, and some vegan. The food was beautiful and popular--those around us, almost all Italians, got several items per person at lunch time, and there was a lot of appreciation for the food. I liked this restaurant but did not love it--I think if I lived in Bologna, and could get the regional specialties that are so delectable any day of the week I would have been more appreciative of this restaurant. As it was, I wished that I was at a more classic Bolognese restaurant eating a heavily pasta and parmesan meal. However, this is recommended highly--exceptionally well prepared and flavored food that might even be slightly healthier than what I craved.

Ghost Music by An Yu

Asian surrealism is not a genre that I am familiar with but I loved this sparse volume, where the desire for something takes on a form and grows to mammoth proportions. For years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, and her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor, especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she can't escape, populated only by a strange orange mushroom. When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law's province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan's world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago. Song discovers a previous life that Bowen had, and why he might not want another child--communication is not his strong suit. It all spins together into a gorgeous and atmospheric novel of art and expression, grief and survival, memory and self-discovery, all beautifully rendered.

Ancient Mariner

May the fourth be with you! We got these wonderful Tiki glasses as well as a Ticki drink book and off we go! 1/2 oz Plantation Overproof Rum 1/2 oz Koala Dark Hawaii Rum 1/2 oz Mount Gay Barbados Rum 1/2 oz Bacardi Rum 1/4 oz Allspice Dram 3/4 oz lime juice 1/2 oz grapefruit juice 1/2 oz mint simple syrup Shake with ice, pour over crushed ice

The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz

This book was recommended by a friend, by way of her son's girlfriend (and of course it is also a New York Times Notable book--a list that I am reading my way through, this being the 41st book read from the 100 listed), and I have to say it is both a fun read, and a well constructed story. This centers on a wealthy, dysfunctional family, the Oppenheimer's, a New York family with triplets born via IVF who were “in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish.” They couldn't be more different from each other, and they couldn't dislike each other more--I had a sort of romantic notion about multiple birth children being close, but here it is more about how they cannot escape each other, which makes them desperate to do so. The father is barely present, so aloof as to have little idea of this sibling distain, and throws himself into collecting art that no one thinks much of at the time, but later discovers it is spectacular. So he has talents, just not as a parent. The mother wants so desperately to have a happy family that she works hard to not see much of anything. The novel’s title contains the key to the story, a fourth child added to the family as the triplets leave home for college. Hers is the distinct narrative voice of the novel and it’s a pleasure to read. Her sharing of the family history and her role in its reconciliation drive the plot, which is well constructed and nicely wrapped together in the end.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

This is so not a good movie. Let me count the ways. In every way it is not at all good, with the exception of the acting quality of the cast and the director. There is so much star power here. Chris Helmsworth is back as Thor--of note, this is his last reprisal of the role it seems, as he just found out that he is homozygous for APOE4, which confers a 10 fold increase in dementia of the Alzheimer's type, and he is retiring early to enjoy himself. The director is Taika Waititi, who has a complicated movie catelog, but he is firmly within the Marvel Universe ouevre, and so he gets a pass on this. In addition, Russell Crowe is Zeus, Christian Bale is the bad guy, and Natalie Portman is the "love" of "love and thunder". Do not get me wrong, I did watch the whole movie, but it is mostly just an uninspired script and a fair amount of action that is not egregiously long. There were some very cool goats that remind us of our puppy that we will carry forward from this experience, but otherwise, it was very mediocre.

Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon

Let's start off by stating that the author and Lola, the protagonist, have roots in Africa and America. The author also has a Nigerian connection, whereas Lola's third country is Senegal, so she speaks French, is college educated, and she initially has high hopes for herself. At the center of this novel is Lola's impression of America before she comes, and what the reality is for an immigrant with education but a lack of a visa as well as financial help this is no paradise. Lola makes a couple of errors when it comes to love, each of which yields her a child, and narrows her options as a result. The most moving moment in the book is when she is speaking with a woman she met in Senegal and bemoans the vast chasm between how Americans and the world depict America as a land of plenty and opportunity, even when they themselves have not had that experience. It is just hard. The story is good but not perfect. There is almost too much packed in and not enough time to unpack it all, but a good read.