Reasons I Stopped Posting

Listed in descending order of importance, here are the reasons I stopped posting over the past 4 years: 

1. Motherhood 

2. Lawyering 

3. Divorce 

4. Dating a non-reader 

5. Starting my own appellate law practice. 

It's been a rough few years, people. Lots of life changes. But I want to start posting again! I miss it. I miss the community of book bloggers. I miss feeling connected with similar people. 

Being a mom is a big change, but I thought maybe I could get my daughter to pick a book to post about every once in awhile, and get her involved in it. Genius, right? Yeah, I know. All my brain power has been lying dormant, so I'm going to have a few genius nuggets here and there. 

Nothing puts a damper on a desire to learn like reading and writing and critical thinking all day at work! But now that I have my own practice, and set my own schedule, maybe that can change. Oh wait. It's a practice that involves even more writing than before. Well, cheers. 

Divorce followed by depression put a huge damper on my desire to be productive. But it didn't put a damper on my writing. I'm also happy to report that we made it through the process alive, and we didn't kill each other. To the contrary, we get along pretty well for divorced people, and we are shockingly good at this co-parenting thing. (I suppose we'll see how it turns out in 15 years or so, but for now, everyone seems to be as well-adjusted as can be expected.) 

Dating a non-reader was the thing that dampered my reading the most. He said I read more than anyone he knows. And I probably read 10 books in the entire year we were together. Yeah - WERE together. It's ok. It was a rebound relationship. He's a decent person, but obviously not for me. 

I actually think that now that things are rolling with my practice I'll get better at time management. And any writing I can do will help hone my craft so to speak. So I will dust off the books on my shelf and get back to it. I think I should start with something frothy and delicious!    

The Unbearable Heaviness of Baking Cake

Sunday afternoon was my meeting with my book club.  I really need to remember to take pictures while we're all there.  Grrr.  Next time!  We read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, and we had a little afternoon tea to go with it. There were cucumber sandwiches, chicken salad and both hot and iced tea.  In keeping with the spirit of the tea party, I made tea bag cookies and petit fours.  It was a LOT of work, but they were very yummy. 

I found out about the tea bag cookies from a post on Book Journey's blog, and they were so cute I had to make them.  I followed the link from her blog and found this blog, which describes how to make them.  In French.  I speak French, but not well enough to follow a recipe in it!  Google translate helped some, but not really.  In any event, the pictures were enough to give me an idea what to do, and I just used some sugar cookie dough I had in my freezer, and dipped the cookies in semi-sweet chocolate.  They turned out cute and tasty, so I'm pretty pleased. 

I also made petit fours.  They took the most time, and I actually burned one of the cakes I was making.  I don't think I've ever actually burned a cake before.  The frosting was sort of a fiasco and in the end they looked more like cake with candle wax dripped all over them than the pretty little petit fours I had envisioned, but they were really good.  That's lemon cake with raspberry filling.  I had to bring the leftovers to work so that I wouldn't eat all of them. 


Oh, did you say this is a book blog and not a baking blog? Ok.  Here are my thoughts after meeting with everyone - for once I really didn't change my mind a whole lot after talking with the group.   

It's difficult to create a synopsis for this book, because there's not a lot of plot.  Still, so much happens!  Oh sweet irony.  There is the central love story between Tereza and Tomas.  Then there's a sort of side love story - Sabina and Franz.  Sabina and Tomas were also lovers, by the way.  Tomas, obviously, is a womanizer.  He loves Tereza, and he is able to separate that love from the physical enjoyment he gets from his encounters with other women.  Unfortunately for Tereza, she is not able to separate it, and his philandering causes her a lot of distress and really strange nightmares.   


Meanwhile, the relationship between Sabina and Franz is sort of converse - with Franz having all the feelings and Sabina unable to fully give her heart to Franz (or anyone else for that matter).  Sabina is an artist, and Franz is an intellectual and a professor.  He's also married.  Eventually he screws up the courage to tell his socialite wife that he's been hooking up with a sexy artist, and he's going to go shack up with her.  When Sabina finds out he left his wife for her, she has wild, passionate sex with Franz one last time and then disappears and moves to the US.  Franz is crushed, but then moves in with some grad student who wears giant glasses. 

This book is more of a portrait of the lives of these people, rather than a story.  And those lives are basically there just as something over which Milan Kundera can drape his philosophy.  The philosophy is really the reason to read the book - it's so interesting and quotable.  And if I had to come up with a theme for the book, it's balance.  The couples are kind of extremes, and they sort of balance each other out.  There are all these contrasting ideas - strength/weakness, lightness/heaviness - and which one is better than the other just depends on your perspective.  Strength is not always better than weakness, and being weak doesn't always mean you're the victim.  Take those traditional ideas that have been put into your head and banish them from whence they came!!! 

The real star of this book is language.  Milan Kundera is Czech, but he has lived in France since 1975.  This novel was originally written in Czech, and then translated into French.  It was first published in French in 1984, and then in its original Czech a year later, when it was also translated into English.  The translation I read was so beautiful, though, I had to keep reminding myself that it was a translation.  The author uses language to explain and clarify, but it's also something more than a tool.  It's how we understand the world, and how we understand each other.  If we understand life in different ways, then we speak a different language - just like Sabina and Franz.  

I'm going to end this post with some of my favorite quotes from this book, which will do a whole lot more towards convincing you to read this book than I ever could.  But you should read it.  

"There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man. ... Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals" 

"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love." 

"If [God] had a mouth, He had to eat.  And if He ate, He had intestines.  But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.  ... Thus [I] came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God's image.  Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and God has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him."  

"When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness.  We say that something has become a great burden to us. ... And Sabina - what had come over her?  Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him.  Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness.  What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being." 

I'm not entirely sure this qualifies as a classic, because it wasn't published until the mid 1980s.  BUT, I'm sort of behind on my challenges, and I had the impression this was a classic when I started it.  I'm not going to link this up to my classics challenge post yet, because if I read enough other stuff, I won't count it.  

It does count, however, for my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die Challenge. Yay!    

Cranberry Bread - the Best Christmas Gift

I haven't ever posted a recipe or anything food related here, but I'm going to give it a shot, because, hey, it's Christmas. Disclaimers: I'm no Pioneer Woman, so I hope you don't have any expectations. Also, I stole the format (and maybe even the tone) for this post from her cooking posts. I love the way she takes pictures of the process, and my admiration may come across as imitation. But really, it's just flattery, right? However, I am not a great writer, I'm not a fancy photographer, and this is a REALLY simple recipe, so really, you probably won't get us confused.

Cranberry Bread (it is a proper noun) is the perfect gift. Wrap it up in tin foil, put a red ribbon around it, and voila! It's also good to bring to the office Holiday Potluck (which is what I'm doing tomorrow).

Start with all these ingredients:


I used margarine this time, because it's what I have. Also, I kind of like it better for consistency reasons, but butter doesn't suck. Use whatever you have. Also, I use imitation vanilla, because I don't have a refined palette and I'm poor. Everything here is readily available in any store at any time. Except the cranberries - those only come to stores from late October through Christmas. The earlier you get the cranberries, the better - if you wait until after Thanksgiving, you'll end up throwing out half of every bag, because they'll be going bad. As soon as I start to see them in stores, I buy as much as I can, and I freeze them all.

Ok, time to get started. Before anything else, preheat the oven and grease the bread pans:


If you haven't yet perfected the act of dusting flour in a greased bread pan, I don't know what to tell you. It's easy. You dump a spoonful of sugar in the bottom and shake until there's flour everywhere. It's an art. It's better to grease and flour than to use some sort of non-stick cooking spray. Trust me.



After the pans are floured, set them aside and get ready for the fun stuff!! Put the softened, butter / margarine into a mixing bowl and dump the sugar on top of it. Turn on the mixer.


Stop the mixer when the mixture looks like this:


Then add the vanilla and eggs.


I will never be the kind of baker who a) breaks eggs perfectly so that the yolk doesn't break and b) doesn't have to pick shells out of the batter. I've come to terms with that. Also, this is the time to get creative with any other flavorings you'd like to add. I bet a little orange zest would be really great, or maybe some nutmeg to make it more savory? I don't know - go nuts!


Wash all the gooey raw egg off of your fingers - or maybe that's me. (I love Bath and Body Works' Christmas scents!) Ok, back to work. Mix in the eggs and vanilla, and turn off the mixer. Then add the sour cream. I have a really scientific way of measuring how much sour cream to mix in. The recipe calls for 1 cup. I usually buy a 16 oz. container of sour cream, and then I put about half of it into the batter. Feel free to actually use measuring cups.


Once the sour cream is blended in, mix all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then add it all in. Don't be delicate. Just dump it. Turn the mixer on low, though, so the flour doesn't fly everywhere when you start mixing.

When the dry ingredients are mixed in, the batter is basically done. It should be the consistency of a thick cake dough. I don't know if you can see it in this picture, but I tried.

Now, it's time to set aside the batter for a minute and get out your cranberries. Put them in a strainer and rinse them with cold water. You'll have to pick out the ones that aren't good anymore. These will be easy to spot - shriveled, mushy, discolored, etc. If you're using frozen berries, make sure they're completely thawed before you start, because the extra water can make mushy bread if you bake frozen berries into the bread. Also, if you're using frozen berries, they will be softer when they come back to room temp, but that doesn't mean they're mushy and bad.


The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of berries, but I ALWAYS put in at least 2 heaping cups. The more berries, the better. You want there to be berries in every bite. It's like in the movie "Casino" where Ace is upset because one blueberry muffin has hundreds of berries and another muffin has 3. You don't want that. Neither does anyone who will be partaking.

Once the berries are folded in ...


... it is time to evenly divide the batter between the two pans. I never actually get an even division, though. Just eyeball it. (Side note: it's really hard to take pictures of myself stirring in cranberries.)


Don't do anything crazy like try to spread out the dough, or shake it so that it settles into the corners. Leave it lumped and misshapen. That stuff will all work itself out in the oven. Bake it for 55 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and it looks like this:


Run a knife around the edges, because inevitably, some of the cranberries will stick to the sides of the pan. It's also advisable to let the bread sit in the pans for about 3-5 minutes to cool. Then, turn the bread out of the pans onto a cooling rack. Then step back and admire how beautiful they are. Then try to resit tearing a corner off of the loaf.


Someday I'll have a kitchen with enough counter space so that I don't have to clear off a space on my desk to cool baked goods (how do you like my computer monitor in the background there?). Sometimes when you turn the bread out of the pan, little bits of it stick to the bottom - mostly cranberries. This is not a tragedy. Eat those bits. It will help you not eat the pretty loaves you're planning to bring to the holiday potluck.


So, that's my little Cranberry Bread adventure. The recipe is below. I hope the Pioneer Woman never sees this, because I'll have to shut down my blog and go into hiding out of embarrassment. But I hope you see it and like it and maybe get some deliciousness out of it.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

BROOKE’S HOLIDAY CRANBERRY BREAD

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups sugar
1 stick margarine, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans.

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla and eggs; mix well. Add sour cream; mix well. Add flour, baking soda and salt; mix well. Stir in cranberries. Divide batter evenly between the prepared pans.

Bake bread until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean - about 55 minutes.