Cooking and Reading

What a great weekend. Cooking and reading. I had gone to Old Town to watch the movie, Outsourced. I'd forgotten that UCLA was playing Notre Dame at the Rose Bowl. The city was jammed early on a Saturday morning. It was also a gorgeous day. All of Southern California seemed to be in the city. So I turned around and went to Bristol Farms instead to pick up some more Wasa crackers and tomatoes. And left with half the store. I could have sworn I was being good.

I've stopped going to the farmer's market on Saturday because I buy a lot of stuff and we can't eat it all that quickly. I have been determined to use up everything I bought at the Thursday market at City Hall and now I have to use the produce I bought at Bristol.

Saturday night we had a beautiful piece of salmon, slow roasted with fresh ginger, garlic and curry powder. Great. I made a salad of Persian cucumber, mint, green onions and heirloom tomato. I say too much green onion, Adrian says too much mint. We had this with orchiette. It was all pretty good.

On Sunday I cooked a pork shoulder butt in my favorite 7 hour cooking method. I stuffed the beautiful scalloped squash and baked those in the little oven. They are for Adrian. For me, I'm making a savory bread pudding with roasted tomatoes and garlic and with roasted garlic bread. Can't wait to taste that. Karen asked if I'd ever had that before. I told her no, that I've just been Jonesing for it since I roasted some tomatoes earlier in the week. Go figure. If it is good, I'm going to share it with the guys at work.

Love that I can read and cook at the same time. First I finished The Art of Aging. Well, if I'm going to be an old lady, I'm going to have to figure out how to do it with gusto. It seems that I may be okay on the gusto front, but it will take constant vigilance. I just really can't recommend this book. I think he had a good pamphlet and tried to expand it into something bigger. Here are the things to remember: get plenty of exercise (yea, sure), don't overeat, maintain close relationships, take calcium supplements, be creative.

The most important thing is to adjust what you consider to be old lady behavior. Understand that the body won't work as well as it used to. Make plans to do things and not just sit and write your blog while listening to books. Do, plan, love, create. And take calcium.

Then I finished The Wheel of Darkness, an Aloysius Pendergast book. They are always a little supernatural, always thrillers. Rene Aubergenois read it. Pendergast is from New Orleans originally, so the ability to be charming and syrupy is an important ability. This starts in a Tibetan Monastary. The Wheel of Life is a popular Buddhist symbol. The writers have perverted this into an uber-menacing symbol. I'm not sure why I read these thrillers. It struck me as I was about 2/3 of the way through that I used to just turn to the end of the book or put in the last tape or CD to make sure everyone is okay. Of course, everyone is always okay, but you have to read enough to learn how they got to that state. I don't love to read about un-natural deaths or deaths in detail, no matter how natural.

So, yes, I skipped a huge part of this. Huge to me, maybe 1/6 of the ending. I was happy. I did go back to find out a couple of things, but I didn't have to read about all that turmoil to enjoy the book. And I really did enjoy it.

Today I read Power Play. This is not part of a series, but I didn't know until the end that I had read quite a few books by this author. He writes about different businesses and puts the protagonist into peril. This industry is aerospace. But, really, they are interchangeable. I'll have to recommend this to my brothers. They like the genre. This type of book is easy to read while moving around, cooking. It doesn't matter if I miss a sentence or two. In fact, I woke up early to watch Sunday Morning on CBS and then continued to read the book while lying abed. Yes, I may have dozed just a bit when they were having dinner. That could have been an interesting part, I may need to go back to listen to that. It did not hurt in figuring out what was happening in the rest of the book.

I think this type of listening is much harder for non-fiction; especially non-thriller-fiction. The suspense may be taut and the writing might be, too, but you don't miss out on the enlightenment that comes with hearing every word of most non-fiction books. My next one is This is Your Brain on Music. What if I find that music is vital? Will I have to stop reading as much and start listening to music?