Hi everyone!
Lots to tell you about! I'm so excited that Rae has been here visiting this weekend and will be staying for book group at my house tomorrow night. We've been doing lots of walking, talking and cooking!
Saturday morning we had a quick cup of coffee with Barb, Mary and Jan before they headed out to the Renaissance Festival. We then headed off for a walk on the labyrinth and then a beautiful walk along Boulder Creek before it got too hot. In the afternoon, we "cruised" along the east end of Pearl Street, had some Glacier Ice Cream (so good!) - check out their website http://www.glacierhomemadeicecream.com/ - apparently they've branched out from our very own local place to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Also, wanted to tell you about a great new shop we discovered at 1625 Pearl Street - Momentum http://www.ourmomentum.com/ . they just opened up last week and sell only fair trade products and has a strong committment to sustainable business practices. It is a very attractive store with some wonderful handmade products. Check it out and support another of our locally-owned businesses!
We did talk about some books at coffee yesterday morning:
Barb strongly recommends a non-fiction book by Luis Alberto Urrea called The Devil's Highway. It is an important and timely book about the history of Mexican immigration.
From Publishers Weekly
In May 2001, 26 Mexican men scrambled across the border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. American Book Awardâ€"winning writer and poet Urrea (Across the Wire; Six Kinds of Sky; etc.), who was born in Tijuana and now lives outside Chicago, tracks the paths those men took from their home state of Veracruz all the way norte. Their enemies were many: the U.S. Border Patrol ("La Migra"); gung-ho gringo vigilantes bent on taking the law into their own hands; the Mexican Federales; rattlesnakes; severe hypothermia and the remorseless sun, a "110 degree nightmare" that dried their bodies and pounded their brains. In artful yet uncomplicated prose, Urrea captivatingly tells how a dozen men squeezed by to safety, and how 14 othersâ€"whom the media labeled the Yuma 14â€"did not. But while many point to the group's smugglers (known as coyotes) as the prime villains of the tragedy, Urrea unloads on, in the words of one Mexican consul, "the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border." Mexican and U.S. border policy is backward, Urrea finds, and it does little to stem the flow of immigrants. Since the policy results in Mexicans making the crossing in increasingly forbidding areas, it contributes to the conditions that kill those who attempt it. Confident and full of righteous rage, Urrea's story is a well-crafted mélange of first-person testimony, geographic history, cultural and economic analysis, poetry and an indictment of immigration policy. It may not directly influence the forces behind the U.S.'s southern border travesties, but it does give names and identities to the faceless and maligned "wetbacks" and "pollos," and highlights the brutality and unsustainable nature of the many walls separating the two countries.
Jan read and recommends Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. This is a first novel and it does sound intriguing.
Amazon.com
Canadian writer Mary Lawson's debut novel is a beautifully crafted and shimmering tale of love, death, and redemption. The story, narrated by 26-year-old Kate Morrison, is set in the eponymous Crow Lake, an isolated rural community where time has stood still. The reader dives in and out of a year's worth of Kate's childhood memories--when she was 7 and her parents were killed in an automobile accident that left Kate, her younger sister Bo, and two older brothers, Matt and Luke, orphaned. When Kate, the successful zoologist and professor who is accustomed to dissecting everything through a microscope, receives an invitation to Matt's son's 18th birthday party, she must suddenly analyze her own relationship and come to terms with her past before she forsakes a future with the man she loves. Kate is still in turmoil over the events of that fateful summer and winter 20 years ago when the tragedy of another local family, the Pyes, spilled over into their lives with earth-shattering consequences. But does the tragedy really lie in the past or the present? Lawson's narrative flows effortlessly in ever-increasing circles, swirling impressions in the reader's mind until form takes shape and the reader is left to reflect on the whole. Crow Lake is a wonderful achievement that will ripple in and out of the reader's consciousness long after the last page is turned.
Jan is currently listening to and enjoying Swimming to Catalina, a suspense/mystery by Stuart Woods
From Publishers Weekly
Formerly a cop and now a lawyer, Stone Barrington is plummeting to the bottom of the ocean with an anchor chained to his waist at the start of Woods's 17th novel (after Dead in the Water, 1997), a smoothly presented if slight thriller that ambles pleasurably through a kidnapping plot involving Barrington's ex-lover (improbably named Arrington). Her husband, actor Vance Calder, flies Barrington out to Hollywood to help find her. In L.A., Barrington goes from flavor-of-the-minute to persona non grata in less time than it takes a flop to disappear from a multiplex. Naturally he's suspicious, so he starts investigating on his own and finds links aplenty among Calder, a mobster named Onofrio Ippolito (head of the Safe Harbor Bank) and labor fixer David Sturmach. The plot moves quickly and is full of dialogue and genial if unsurprising gibes at self-centered stars. Unsurprising is the key word here. Neither the mystery nor the romantic subplot contributes much in the way of suspense to this pleasant, inoffensive airplane read
Rae read and recommends two books:
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky - this two-part novel was written in WWII France and has only recently been found and published.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas
The Mighty Heart by Marianne Pearl - Daniel Pearl's wife's account of her husband's kidnapping and murder in Pakistan.
From Publishers Weekly
When Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, his very pregnant wife, Mariane, was left to try to manage the search effort. In this memoir of the month between Pearl's kidnapping and news of his death, she is unflinching, revealing every emotional detail with such honesty that to call the book heart-wrenching is to minimize its power. A journalist herself, Mariane is adept at detail and pacing, letting the events unfold as they happened, complete with their frustrating dead-ends and the tangle of Karachi's bureaucracy. She weaves in memories and thoughts about Danny, which give the book a keen poignancy. She describes how they first met at a party of her mother's, where he looked like "an elegant extra-terrestrial casting a delighted but somewhat perplexed glance at the earthly specimens." Later, after they were married and Mariane got pregnant, he would lean close to her growing belly and talk to the baby in a made-up language he was sure the baby would learn post-birth. After the kidnapping, as she searched his computer for clues, Mariane stumbled upon quirky lists he made, like "Things I Love About Mariane." Such insight into Pearl's personality make the tragedy of his death even sharper. As Mariane deals with his murder and faces the birth of their son alone, she acts with the same sincerity and grace that brought her through the ordeal of the kidnapping. It's not difficult to see why, on the list of things he loved about her, Pearl included: "Has incredible ability to see herself and others with clear perspective."
Website of the Week - www.more.com - this is the website of the magazine More - "celebrating women of over 40" (that's most of us!). I've recently read some interesting articles on this site - one was by Suzanne Braun Levine and is called "Rewriting the Terms of Endearment in a Long-Term Marriage" and the other was "Love and Money: Breadwinner Wives" by Sandy Hingston. You can find these articles and lots more on the website.
Podcast of the Week - http://www.more.com/more/category.jsp?categoryid=/templatedata/more/category/data/1175264522535.xml - this is the podcast from More Magazine that is hosted by Katherine Lanpher - interesting topics and good interviews.
Vocabulary Word of the Week - another one from Rae is "querulous":
querulous \KWER-uh-luhs; -yuh\, adjective:
1. Apt to find fault; habitually complaining.
2. Expressing complaint; fretful; whining.
Querulous Oscar rattles on, never more or less than himself, but never much more than the content of his grumpy rattling.
-- Sven Birkerts, "A Frolic of His Own", New Republic, February 7, 1994
Mam is a tragic figure when transported to New York by her successful sons -- querulous, unable to get a decent cup of tea.
-- Maureen Howard, "McCourt's New World", New York Times, September 19, 1999
Men who feel strong in the justice of their cause, or confident in their powers, do not waste breath in childish boasts of their own superiority and querulous depreciation of their antagonists.
-- James Russell Lowell, "The Pickens-and-Stealin's Rebellion", The Atlantic, June 1861
Querulous comes from Latin querulus, from queri, "to complain."
Cooking and Food Report:
Although I have reported on this restaurant before, it does deserve another mention and that is Radda, a trattoria located next to the Ideal Market on Alpine Avenue. It has become a favorite of mine and Jack's and the food is consistently outstanding. Even though it can get a bit crowded and the noise level gets a little high, it is still worth a visit. We went there on Friday evening after Rae arrived and had 3 excellent meals. Jack had pasta with a wild boar ragu. Rae had gnocchi bolognese and I had seared tuna with grilled asparagus.
While we were waiting for our table at Radda, Judy and Joe Kurtz were leaving after their dinner there. Joe told us about his favorite restaurant located in Lyons - The Gateway Cafe - http://www.gatewaycafe.com/ - it appears that they're only open dinner. The menu looks fantastic - we'll definitely give it a try! Thanks, Joe!
Rae, Jack and I had a great breakfast at The Walnut Cafe yesterday - another favorite breakfast spot of ours, it is located on Walnut in the shopping center at the northeast corner of 30th and Walnut. http://www.walnutcafe.com/walnutcafe.htm. They have a great breakfast and lunch menu with lots of "healthy" alternatives but the best thing about the Walnut Cafe are their pies. I have often gotten them for holiday dinners. The owner and pie baker is Dana Derichsweiler. If you happen to be in South Boulder (SOBO!), check out the South Side Walnut Cafe in the Table Mesa Shopping Center - great space!
I did do some cooking this weekend - I made a lovely Tuscan White Bean and Garlic Soup for our lunch yesterday. Once again, a recipe from Giada De Laurentiis http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_35961,00.html - it was velvety and smooth, not too thick and great with grilled bread on the side. We actually discovered a new bread yesterday at Udi's stand - www.udisfood.com at the Farmer's Market. It looked like Ciabatta but was called Filone - http://www.puratos.ca/news_events/latest_news/list/filone.aspx. They make this with a combination of white flour, whole wheat flour and spelt. Apparently the spelt helps form a great crust and we were assured that the filone lasts longer than ciabatta.
Dinner last night was Classic Spaghetti Carbonara from Emeril Lagasse. Really simple to make and I like that it doesn't use cream (practically a diet meal - not!) We served it with a simple salad of sliced tomatoes, avocado and chopped scallions. http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_10210,00.html
Breakfast this morning, after our walk and "smudging" on the labyrinth, was Giada's Ricotta Blueberry Pancakes - so light and delicious! http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_31908,00.html
We had a great afternoon - we took a drive up to Allenspark to see Linn and Susan's fabulous new kitchen, then headed over to Peaceful Valley Ranch http://www.peacefulvalley.com/to say hi to Linn who is working there now. Pretty cool place! On Linn's recommendation we headed over to Mary's Lake Lodge in Estes Park for lunch. We were pretty impressed. It is a lovely place with a great restaurant. The menu is extensive - Jack had a "well-stocked" seafood bisque and a wonderful reuben sandwich with homemade potato chips; Rae had a creamy roasted red pepper soup that was so well seasoned. I had a huge caesar salad and then Rae and I shared chicken pot pie with a puff pastry crust - mmmmmm-good. Real comfort food. Thanks, Linn for the suggestion! http://www.maryslakelodge.com/.Back home in Boulder, we had our final treat - hot fudge sundaes at The Cheesecake Factory on Pearl Street - pretty decadent but we were able to "clean our plates".
Well, no dinner for us tonight - I'm so happy that Rae is here until Tuesday morning. She and I will be preparing for book group at my house tomorrow evening. I have a pretty wonderful menu planned. The Northeast Spain menu is straight from Fine Cooking Magazine http://www.taunton.com/finecooking/menus/dinner-from-northeast-spain.aspx - I'll have a detailed report on the results next week. I can tell you now that our dessert has already been tested by Libby - it is Chocolate Bread Pudding from Gale Gand of the Food Network http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_27065,00.html
Have a great week everyone!
Love,
Susan
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