Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

I saw this on Obama's reading list and it is both something I might have otherwise missed, and that I really enjoyed. It is set in Boston in 1974, President Richard Nixon has just resigned, a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools, and irate White parents are raising hell. Among them is Mary Pat Fennessy, widowed by her first husband, divorced by her second and working as a hospital aide in a skilled nursing facility. Mary Pat’s quotient of personal losses increases right away. Her only surviving child, 17-year-old Jules, fails to come home after a night out with friends, or the following day, or the day after that. As a lifelong resident of Southie, a lower-middle-class Irish neighborhood where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Mary Pat assumes it won’t take her long to piece together what happened. Yet her inquiries get her almost nowhere, and the police don’t fare much better. Then comes a complication. On the night of Jules’s disappearance, a young Black man was found dead on Southie subway tracks, his mangled body suggesting that a train ran over him, but all is not as it appears. The book deals with racism and poverty in a very effective and different way.

Wedding Cake

The cake! Something that seems to be fading a bit in importance, which overall I think is a good thing. The last wedding I went to was on a dairy sheep farm, and the cake was a tower of cheese--so much more pratcial and so much less fragile--and about equivalent in cost to a bakery cake! My friend that I bake with and I made this one for the wedding on one of my son's and it is always a bit of a pain and it is not at all practical as a means of feeding your wedding guests. It is soley for the pictures, it often times seems. So, we made it a real cake, with real frosting that was purported to hold up well to the elements, and told the wedding planner that it was just for looks, do not worry if flies land on it or bees swarm it. Almost no one will eat it, and we will warn them--it is at their own risk!

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

This book is long listed for the 2023 Booker Prize, and it fits that bill well. It is a debut novel and the prize committee has a track record of including first time authors amongst those it recognizes. It deals with intense truths about life in a not usual and often heart rending ways. The book begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father. Gopi practices squash every day at Western Lane, a sports center just outside London to such an intense degree that it is inescapably about coping, grief, and loss--for both she and her father. The book ends with her playing the final of the Durham and Cleveland squash tournament. The arc is picture perfect: tragedy, sporting trial, potential triumph. The tension is heightened by squash-obsessed, emotionally uncommunicative Pa; fearful Aunt Ranjan is the obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way. There is a love interest, Ged, whose mother intervenes at all the wrong moments--as mothers are prone to do. The underlying emotional truths are raw and well told.

Chile Margarita

In the lead up to the wedding for one of my kids, I sent my spouse to Trader Joe's to get a few things that I needed (or at least preferred to get there) for the food. We had a monumental undertaking and I wanted all the do ahead pieces to be accomplished in that time frame (no, that did not 100% happen! But enough of it happened that it wasn't terrible to be in my house or in my shoes the week of the event). One silver lining to that stop was that he bought these dried oranges and the chili lime salt mix and decided to pair them with some of the voluminous chiles in our garden and make a cocktail. Tequila 2 1/4 oz Mezcal 1 1/2 oz Ancho Reyes 1 1/4 oz Lime juice 1 1/2 oz Chocolate bitters 5 dashes City’s bitters 5 dashes Shake with ice; strain over fresh ice into glasses rimmed with Chile-lime (I used Trader Joe’s, but could use Tajin), garnish with dehydrated citrus wheel.

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by CW Goodyear

So, why Garfield, you ask? Before read this I would have agreed with you. I did venture to his homestead once when I was in Ohio (which is the breeding ground of more Presidents than any other state than Virginia, and let's face it, they got a huge head start with the whole pre-and post Revolutionary War cabal, making a name for themselves with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution business). It’s not immediately evident why anyone should write an ambitious, thorough, supremely researched biography of James Garfield, the first such effort in nearly a half-century. The nation’s 20th president served just 200 days in office, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by an assassin’s bullet, and seemingly the most interesting part of that abbreviated tenure — the assassination. Wrong! Garfield lived it all — starting work as a teenager on an Ohio canal towpath, traveling across a region whose canals his father helped build, teaching and ministering on the frontiers of the Western Reserve, then rising in local politics through the turbulent prewar years as the country was wrenched apart by slavery, ascending to fame in Civil War combat as one of the few Union officers who showed any ambition and aggression in the early years (bravery mixed with equal parts luck on the battlefield), and then catapulting himself into Congress at 31. From his first election as head of the debating society at Williams College to a then-long tenure of 17 years in the House and finally on to the White House, Garfield never lost an election. And, in advance of him becoming president himself, he presided over preventing Southern Dixiecrats from stealing the election from Rutherford Hayes from succeeding. He was the original Black Lives Matter guy. He saw the dangers for ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, and while he lost many of these battles, he was unwaveringly anti-slavery before the war, and a supporter of full rights for black citizens. He lobbied for equal pay for equal work for black soldiers. Again, did not win many of these battles, but he fought them. It was his intellectual curiosity and thirst for education that would be one Garfield’s most lasting legacies: He fought for the creation of the federal Department of Education as one of the reforms necessary for a maturing country, which had extended the franchise to Blacks in early Reconstruction. The man who shot him wanted his VP, Chester Arthur to be President--which happened, but Arthur died of kidney disease at the end of Garfield's term, and it is possible he was born on the Canadian side of the border, no one knows for sure.

The Calm Before The Storm

My spouse and I recently cooked for our son's wedding weekend, which consisted of a rehearsal dinner for 120 people and the wedding dinner for 250 people. We did a fair amount of planning ahead of time for the event, and we had the desserts for both events in the freezer long beforehand. We were roasting a pig for the big day and had some help lined up for that arduous task, but we hadn't quite nailed down what we were going to make other than that. So, what did we do? We took a quick 4-day vacation to clear our heads, calm down a bit, catch our breaths, and planned the menu. We went to my spouse's family house in central Vermont, a place that his grandparents bought before WWII and which he has been going to all his life, and I have been going to for over 40 years. When I think about it, it is the place that each of us has been going to longer than any other place period, and certainly as a shared experience, Vermont is it for us. We both feel a sense of peace there, and we have long established things we do as well as something new, but hands down, we have a reliably good time there. I have to admit that when we got to the airport on Thursday morning before the sun came up I had serious second thoughts. Is this a good idea? Abandon ship with very little actually done and take time for us? It turns out it was an excellent idea--my head stopped spinning with all that I had to do and say, all the meeting and greeting, all the emotions that such events are bound to stir up, and just focused on peace and place.

Everything's Fine by Cecelia Rabess

Here is the question at hand--can a black liberal woman and a white conservative man make it work? I am thinking no, and that's it, washing my hands of it, but this first time author works to see it through, what are the odds? Jess is low woman on the totem pole at Goldman Sachs. She is patronized and undervalued by the men around her, including Josh, who fails to see how race and gender put her at a disadvantage, and how little credit she gets for her ideas. They bicker; they get in each other’s hair. Eventually, they become friends. There’s definite romantic chemistry but when they hook up, it’s a surprise to both, although Josh will later admit to Jess that he had always been a bit smitten. This is a good book, one that is able to laugh at itself, and you will remember it when you hear Everything's fine again. Because in fact it is not.

Khai Jiao

I admit, this is not much to look at, but it is possibly the best Asian egg dish I have had, and maybe one of two go to ways to prepare eggs (prior to trying this, I also enjoy a more traditional French style omelet, leaning towards a less fluffy and thinner version that has a lot of flavor). I added green beans, and you can add anything--I put in in the pan with the oil hot, and then added egg over it once it was heated a bit. 2 large eggs ½ teaspoon lime juice or vinegar ½ teaspoon Thai fish sauce 1 tablespoon water 1 tablespoon rice flour or cornstarch 2-4 Tbs. vegetable oil (the traditional recipe has 3-4 times this much--it is supposed to fry!) Combine eggs, lime juice or vinegar, fish sauce, water, and rice flour or cornstarch in a medium bowl. Beat with a fork until frothy. If the flour forms a few lumps, break up as many as possible with a fork. Heat the vegetable oil in a small pot or a round-bottom wok set over medium-high heat until lightly smoking. Hold the egg bowl about one foot above the pan and pour the egg mixture into the oil in one go. The egg mixture will immediately puff up. Do not disturb it. After a minute or once the bottom is browning, flip the omelet. There’s no need to keep it nice and round; we want asymmetrical edges. Let the other side cook for another 30 seconds. Remove the omelet from the pan and serve immediately.

Happy Place by Emily Henry

I am not one who goes in much for romance--when reading frothy fiction, I lean toward murder mysteries instead; but I have enjoyed the two previous Emily Henry books that I have read. In spite of myself, I liked them a lot. This one follows ex-fiancés Harriet, a conflict-avoidant surgical resident, and Wyn, a quick-witted charmer who dances through life into their long drawn out and secret break-up. They have both struggled to find something that they love to do that isn't just being with each other, and they have failed kind of miserably. Instead of figuring that out, they split up with each other. This is how they get back together (which is really not a spoiler because this is an Emily Henry book--too short for them to find happiness elsewhere, so it must be with each other). They share a group of close friends that, for the last decade, have scheduled an annual getaway to a small cottage in Maine as a respite from their daily lives. But this year, Harriet and Wyn haven’t told their friends that they have broken up, leaving them lying through their teeth for a week as they pretend to be a couple to avoid breaking their friends’ hearts. This has a lot of the successful elements of her previous books, but for some reason this just didn't resonate for me. On the other hand, would I read another one of her books? Absolutely!

Rediscovering Quiche

When I left my parents house to go to college almost 50 years ago there were only two things that I made reliably well--chocolate chip cookies and quiche. My father's company when I was in high school was on acreage that was once an apple orchard, and rather than cut them all down, they left them, and employees were allowed to pick apples there. My parents took that opportunity to make lots of applesauce, apple butter, and apple pies every fall. Mostly I peeled and cut apples, but I somehow also learned to roll out crust, and both of these skills have served me well in the years since. Along the way though, I stopped making quiche, I cannot say why. That neglect is over now, because in the intense run up to my son's wedding a couple of weeks ago, where my spouse and I were prepping all the food, I decided I should add quiche to my list of things to do. We had family and friends coming on site the morning of the wedding to set everything up and it seemed like an easy food to serve. You didn't even necessarily need a fork or a plate to eat it, it could be hot or room temp (hot is better, much better) and the most surprising thing of all, it was still easy to make. I hadn't lost it! I used the Moosewood cookbook that I have had since my first year of college for the filling, and I was happy with the results. It is nice to go back to the beginning sometimes. We also had chocolate chip cookies, but my spouse made them, and they had the added punch of cardamom, something my early cookies lacked but is a nice addition.