hopefully yum

just stuck this in the oven. it's the thing i made a couple weeks ago using the wrong kind of peppers, so i'm hoping this time i'll actually be able to use it. remember to get mild peppers to put as the base! otherwise, pretty simple

Chicken Chile Relleno Casserole

Preheat oven to 350.

2 4 oz cans diced chiles – put in bottom of Pam-sprayed dish

Chop and sauté 1 onion for about 10 minutes.

Chop some garlic and a de-seeded jalapeno and add to onion.

Shred a cooked chicken breast and add in.

Season with your favorite spicy chicken seasoning.

Saute a little longer.

Layer on top of chiles.

Layer on some shredded cheese.

Beat 4 eggs. Add 2 cups skim milk & 1 cup half & half. Add 1 cup flour, some salt, pepper, cumin powder and ground coriander seed. Beat again.

Pour over chile/chicken/cheese.

Bake at 350 for about an hour.

not muches:
the awkward teenage boy talking to his dog on the street - i do that all the time at home
the fact that the walk home was not much longer than usual, even with what felt like 20lb of books
all the hours of work those books represent

success and failure

after a quick dash to the market across the street, made myself some hangover french toast. first piece diving - egg soaked and sweet and divine. second piece, i'm not finishing as it's dry and a bit burnt and i apparently just failed in my excitement over the success of the first. such sadness.

today's book (to read, not to write about - that's later today): crucifixion by power. guatemalan society 1944-1965. hopefully helpful, but the years are too late for my project in many ways. why has no one written about guatemala in the years i want to study!?!!!!?

D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths

quick one for today, as i need to get back to reading for class


this was one of the books my brother and i had out of the public library every other week as kids. they also have a wonderful book of greek myths, but for some reason we always went with norse myths. it was out of print for years, but they finally reissued it a few years ago, just in time for my brother's sixteenth birthday.

anyways, its got all the classics and, most importantly, gorgeous swirling illustrations. it's a set of myths that are less well known than greek or roman, but just as intriguing, engaging, and adventurous. names that evade easy pronunciation and complex family trees, everything we love about myths. wonderful for bedtime - just the right length - or a rainy day. sure to inspire all sorts of new games of pretend.

might as well!

stolen from somethingbookish
because, well, i'm in the middle of watching "Knocked Up" (which i'm enjoying tremendously), but, as rp and i have discovered, we can no longer just watch a movie. i have to multitask.... but i can't generally get anything productive done while watching a movie i haven't seen before, so things like book lists work well. as do facebook, nytimes.com, anthropologie.com, etc.

speaking of which, i bought a sweater coat and jeans today! and i can't find a picture of the silly thing online. so here's a rather fuzzy photo taken with my iphotobooth. i'll try to get a better one tomorrow or something. but really, i'm so happy. it's from macys, not anthropologie, thus not all nice and all-natural fibers, but it's got pockets, is empire waisted with buttons just to the waist, three quarter length sleeved and all knobbly! and soooo comfortable and flattering. very very happy.


anyways, here's the bookthing!

Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.

(Note that DNF=”did not finish”)

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
+One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
+Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
+*Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
+War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
+*Emma
+The Blind Assassin
+The Kite Runner
+Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
+*American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
+Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
+Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
+*Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
+*Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
+The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
+Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
+The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
+Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
+The Unbearable Lightness of Being
+*Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
+Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlasa
The Confusion
+Lolita
+*Persuasion
+Northanger Abbey
+*The Catcher in the Rye
+On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*The Hobbit
+ In Cold Blood
+ White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
+The Three Musketeers

rose daughter

another favorite today. as i finished it (for probably the 20th time) last night, i might as well post Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter.


i have always been a fan of fairy tales, whether the originals or novelizations, and Robin Mckinley writes some of the best. this is her second retelling of Beauty and the Beast, the first being Beauty, but this is the one i have always had at school with me, and have always been able to read a few pages of before bedtime to calm me down and clear my mind. i love them both, but whether it's just that this one is longer and thus lets me spend more time with it or that the maturity and complexity of the narrative touch me more, this is the one i turn to first.

Rose Daughter is, naturally, about transformation, growth, and love, like any good fairy tale. mckinley complicates the original story with the development of beauty's sisters and their own narratives in ways that make beauty herself more exceptional and, at the same time, unremarkable. it is possible to see in jeweltongue and lionheart the cruel sisters of the original tale, but only as character facets that city life encouraged and that could be quickly banished when faced with hard work and love. of the three, beauty undergoes the least transformation, despite her journey. her bravery becomes more accentuated, but she triumphs because she already has that courage and sensibility within her. she is an incredibly comforting character, both to those she interacts with in the book, and to the reader, for she is straightforward, sincere, and practical. not saintly, a little peculiar, but always the one to quietly take charge and do what needs to be done. while this makes for a lovely heroine, it does not make for a terribly complex narrative, and so it is mckinley's development of the sisters, father, and townspeople that make this story powerful.

mmmmmmmmmm

made albondigas for dinner tonight. absolutely delish. as in turned out just like i wanted it to and perfect for a lovely fall evening.

1 quart beef or chicken broth
2/3ish cup of tomato sauce
an onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic

1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 lb ground pork
1/3 cup cooked rice
1 egg
salt and pepper
garlic powder
pico de gallo powder or other chili powder

sautee the garlic and the onions in some oil til soft. pour in the tomato sauce and broth and bring to a boil.

in a bowl, lightly beat the egg. add ground meat, rice, and spices and mix. shape into meatballs and drop into broth. cover tightly and simmer for 30 min.

not muches:

the tupperware of chocolate eyeballs passed around during workshop and the giggles it inspired as people picked their favorite colors while someone spoke eruditely about the presenter's dissertation proposal.

an equal music

i've decided to jump on the bandwagon and post a book a day for NaBloPoMo. All sorts of books - children's, novels, history, poetry, whatever feels right for that day. Things i've read recently, things i read a long time ago, things i'd like to read. to start, a favorite book. one i could (and have) read many many times. one that sits by my bedside so that i can pick it up and read a page when i need to sleep.


this was the first of vikram seth's books that i found, thanks to momma as usual, and i have read many many more since. perhaps his best known is A Suitable Boy, a huge tome of a book that travels all over india, weaving together generations and families into a glorious narrative of independence. An Equal Music is much quieter, much smaller, but no less beautiful. perhaps the best verbalization of how it feels to play music that i've ever read, it's the story of a second violinist in london, the music he plays, and the people with whom and for whom he plays it. seth is a poet as well as a novelist and the prose in the book paints loving pictures of the city in fall, of the decrepitude of the protagonist's home town, of the violin he cannot live without, of the reflection of a beloved face in a window. it is not a book that hits you over the head but instead pulls you gently along, all the time singing in your mind. it reads as though it has a soundtrack, for most of all it is a story about music, but there is no need to find each piece described or have a prior knowledge of composers and eras, for seth's prose manages to provide enough. it is at times a melancholy book about a man stuck in a rut and a woman slowly losing herself, but it is also joyous, celebratory, and compassionate.

it is also a book that always makes me miss my cello and chamber music. for Michael, the protagonist, has many families, but the one that remains strongest, most present throughout the novel is his quartet. i didn't manage to bring my cello with me to chicago - it's a rather cumbersome piece of luggage and i had too much already - but i'll bring it back after christmas, along with a new years resolution to actually play it. hopefully.