Waffling and Breakfast

When I was a kid, the number-one thing I remember most about cereal commericals isn't the cartoon characters or copious amount of sugar, but the phrase and image of "part of a complete breakfast."

As I recall, a complete breakfast included: a bowl of the advertised cereal, a glass of milk, a glass of orange juice, a grapefruit, two eggs sunny side up, some sausage or bacon, toast, waffles, hashbrowns and the soles of old shoes. In all seriousness though, there was an awful lot of food in those shots and I don't know anybody outside of a Sunday brunch line who eats that much for breakfast.

Like most people, when I eat cereal, all I eat is cereal, maybe -maybe- with some juice. Unlike most people, I never put milk on my cereal unless it's grape nuts (because you have to) or rice krispies (because they snap, crackle, pop!). I hate soggy cereal, so I just drink my milk on the side. How very When Harry Met Sally of me.

All of this is so say, after much waffling (or not bothering) Kasey and I decided on the next selection for our two-person book club: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. I know I said I wanted to do something wintery , but with all the Holiday hubbub something short and frothier seemed more appropo, so Mark Halprin's 768 page Winter's Tale will have to wait until January.We might finish before Christmas, we might not (we mightn't have bothered to picked a date yet), but you can bet when we finish we'll be meeting outside the local Tiffany's, Duncan Donuts in hand.

Cinnaminninies and Cheatin' Cherry Pie

In preparation for Thanksgiving, I made and froze Mr. Cleaver's holiday cherry pie this afternoon to be baked on Thursday. There's no recipe for the pie because I am a total cheater and use the cherries from a can. The crust however, is totally homemade, flakey, and delicious. You can find the recipe for that here. There is a bonus recipe at the bottom of this post, for those inclined. 

Mr. Cleaver loves pie. Particularly cherry. Last year, even though we had an apple pie in the freezer, Mr. Cleaver requested cherry. Since I love making pies, I obliged and we didn't eat the apple pie until the Superbowl, which made the Bears spectacular loss more bearable (pun? perhaps intended). This year, since I knew saving the second apple pie would be pointless, I ate it several weeks ago.

In many ways, pie  has been a central part of Mr. Cleaver and I's relationship. Like I said before,  Mr. Cleaver loves pie and I love making it.

It started, ever so circuitously, at Thanksgiving. I was living in Maine and had just started dating Mr. Cleaver a few weeks before. He invited me to accompany him to his parents for Thanksgiving, but I thought that was way too soon to be meeting the folks, so I opted to go with the rest of interns buddies to the Portland Stage annual Thanksgiving.

Hating to come empty-handed, I made a raspberry pie. But living in a furnished apartment meant I was missing several of my usual tools and, among other things, I ended up having to use an oddly shaped glass to roll out my crust. The pie turned out fine, but I wasn't looking forward to using a glass for the rest of the year.

Mr. Cleaver doesn't get any of that pie, but he does finds out that I make them. Gears begin to spin.

Flash forward a few weeks and Christmas is fast approaching. This time, still unable to travel to California for the Holidays, I have accepted Mr. Cleaver's invitation to join his family.  Christmas is still several weeks away, but John has an early gift to give me.  He prefaces the gift by saying that he's been carrying it around in his car for several weeks, and that he was afraid to give it to me, because he didn't want me to think that he had certain expectations, etc., etc.

After much waffling, he gives me a rolling pin.

I am thrilled, he is thrilled I'm thrilled. Everyone is thrilled except my roommate, who had also purchased me a rolling pin for Christmas.

Christmastime and I'm off to Mr. Cleaver's folks, a perfectly-rolled out crust on another raspberry pie for his folks and even though we've only been dating two months, I want to make a good impression. I present his mother with my pie, only to find out they have about four other pies already purchased for about six people. This is a pie-loving family.

Despite this excess of pie, his family is very kind and they eat the pie I brought and declare it tasty. I am relived, though slightly weirded-out by how Mr. Cleaver's brother-in-law keeps making references to how I'm going to be the next in-law.  Let's just call it foreshadowing.

Several months later, I'm at Mr. Cleaver's apartment and I find some cherry pie filling in his pantry. Just in case, you know, I was over and just really wanted to make a pie. 

Bonus Recipe:

Cinnaminninies:

 I doubt my father came up with these, but he did have an awful good name for them. This is my favorite way of putting that extra pie dough to use. 

Ingredients: Leftover pie dough, Milk, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, and  Sugar.

Preheat over to 350.

Place small bits of leftover dough in a pie tin. Brush with a small amount of milk and sprinkle with cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar as desired. Cook for about 20 minutes or until brown on edges.Enjoy warm, but let cool enough so they don't become "cinnaminni-owies."

Steinbeck: Makes a Good Book and a Good Sandwich

As promised, my two-person book club met up at the Bourgeois Pig last week for some serious Steinbeck dissection.

Ms. Kasey and I knew we had truly chosen the right locale for our meeting when we found an "East of Eden" sandwich on the menu board. We of course had to order one (as seen above) and I nabbed a chicken sandwich to satiate any meat-eating needs for the evening. Though the "Eden" sandwich was quite the veggi delight with avocados, mushroom that tasted like chicken and lots of leafy greens.

We actually discussed the book for at least a half and hour to 45 minutes, not bad for book-club beginners, before we descended into letting the brunette with the laptop at the next table learn much too much about our personal lives.

As for the book?

I love - love - Steinbeck. In high school and college I had a tiny Mitsubishi pickup truck I named Rocinante in honor of Steinbeck's truck from Travels with Charley, a truck that my parents took a special trip to Salinas to so I could see the real thing. My Rocinante is currently living his third incarnation with some family friends on Mt. Veeder, having survived several trips to Oregon and a run-in with some overnight hit-and-runners in Santa Cruz.

I grew up in the Bay Area, so the worlds of Steinbeck's novels are something familiar and dear to me. His writing is honest and he is fair man who gives the bum and rich man equal dignity, with perhaps more dignity to the bum.

My two favorite Steinbeck works are the aforementioned Travels with Charley and East of Eden. Charley is a love letter to America - a kind-hearted real-life roadtrip filled with the beauty of the America landscape and the kindness of strangers. 

Eden dances on the boundary of fiction and non-fiction: the Trasks and the Hamiltons are real people, with a very young Steinbeck even making an appearance. But beyond these family trees, what is really true?

Invented or not, the epic of these families is both touching and painful.  Most of our discussion on Thursday focused on the familial relationships: sibling rivalries, the love of between parent and child - how our own lives intersect and different from the Hamiltons and the Trasks. Intersections, I'm sure, even the brunette with the laptop would understand.

PS: We're currently looking for our next book selection: preferably something classic, wintery and shorter than Eden. If I hadn't just read Call of the Wild it would have been perfect. I'm thinking maybe Ethan Frome? I'd love to hear any suggestions!

Local Eating, Vacation Style

I've been a bit lax in posting this week (it's been one of those). But I've been wanting to post a few photos from the honeymoon back in October and as fall is quickly ending, now seemed as appropriate time as any.

Today's theme: the best of eating locally in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

Cider and syrup. It doesn't get any better than that.

Except for maybe the Maple Syrup Candy...

Ladybug Invasion!

Maybe it was due to the unseasonably warm weather today, but there was a ladybug invasion in Chicago today. Look at how many are on our kitchen window (not to mention the awesome view of the McDonald's parking lot...)!

Good thing these guys are supposed to be lucky!

Happy Hallowe'en

If fall is my favorite season, then Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I think a lot of this has to do with my last name formerly being a variation of bat. When you're named after icon of a holiday, there are certain expectations to live up to, as I'm sure any Noelles or Hollys can attest to. And so, throughout my childhood I dove into decorating our house with cobwebs and cutouts of pumpkins, haunted houses and my mother's windsock collection.  I am also blessed with a mother who sews, so I always had really awesome costumes, which corresponds nicely with that theatrical bent of mine.

Throughout  college, I continued to dress up in interesting, if less elaborate, costumes and would throw halloween parties with my housemates, where we would borrow the theatre department's fog machine, cover all the furniture in white sheets to look like a haunted house, mull cider and I would try to get people to bob for apples (no one would).

This year, between getting married and boo.scream.thump and life, I haven't had time to pull anything crazy together, so the Charlie Brown shirt makes yet another appearance and a single small white mini pumpkin decorates the top of the tv. 

All of this is not to say that I'm not going to enjoy the day, because there is yet another reason that I love Halloween. For it was on this lovely holiday two years ago that I met my Mr. Cleaver.

Actually, that's not entirely true. We had met briefly twice before at bar trivia (shh.. don't tell my mother!), but we both consider this the night we truly met. I was interning in Maine and his housemate, my coworker, was throwing a party.

I came as Charlie Brown (I had a couple of lazy years in there, so sue me) and he, in the manner of most last-minute male costumes, was Hugh Hefner. About ten minutes into the party we started chatting and continued to do so for the next four hours or so. Or as a friend later said: "you guys were thisclose for four hours!"

And the rest, as they say, is history.

boo.scream.thump in the night

Last night was boo.scream.thump in the night, otherwise known as Greasy Joan & Co.'s fall benefit and first performance of our inaugural reading series.

I've been working for this wonderful, if possibly unfortunately-named, Chicago-based theatre company for a 1¼ years - pretty much the entire time I've lived here - and have served as company manager for little under a year. As part of my expanded responsibilities this year, I've been working with several others on our new reading series, so last night was pretty exciting for me personally.

Since Greasy Joan's mission statement is about doing classic work, we decided to have our October reading focused on literary ghost stories, so I spent a month this summer reading a bunch of public-domain ghost stories by classic authors (thanks Project Gutenberg!) and made a short list. We end up doing three: Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Mark Twain's A Ghost Story, and Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost.

Above are a few pictures of the event, which went over well as a party, performance, and fundraiser. It was really dark in the space, so the photos all have a blurry/ghostly quality, which seems rather fitting.

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PS - I've been asked to do coffee hour at church tomorrow and consequently did some baking earlier tonight, so I'll be posting a new recipe tomorrow!

Shifting Seasons

Fall, or perhaps Winter, has finally come to Chicago.

The Windy City, it seems, likes its seasons lengthy and sudden - it has little patience for silly intermediaries like Fall and Spring. In other words, in a week's time I have gone from t-shirts and skirts to wool sweaters and winter coats.

Autumn is my favorite of all the seasons, but Fall in Chicago isn't the crisp cooling of California or the vibrant maple reds of New England. It has a mood entirely of it's own. Splashes of yellow intermix with dull reds and brown on civic trees and Lake Michigan grows dirty and cruel in appearance. Choppy waves sends joggers to higher paths, pleasure boats to shrink-wrapped sleep and I pull my coat a tighter as I pass on the bus.

But I like wool sweaters and crisp breezes and snacking on hot cider and popcorn. The shifting seasons give me excuse to hunker down into the hobbies I ignore in friendlier weather, namely knitting.

I'll turn on an oven to 375° in the dead heat of summer to bake a cake, but I won't touch yarn above 65°. I an not a die hard knitter. I have no stash. I've attempted no afghan. But after finally giving in to the knitting bandwagon that over took all eight of my fellow interns in Portland, I have come to love this rather complicated form of weaving.

The thing that I think is amazing about knitting is that I'm making fabric, in the exact shape (hopefully) that I want it to be - no cutting, maybe a seam here or there, but largely a fully-fashioned thing pops off of the needles like Athena from Zeus' head, whether it be a sock, a sweater, or an elephant.

I am currently working on my first "sweater," a shrug really, and I'm very excited by it because it looks so, well sweater-y. It makes me feel like a real knitter or at least a more practical knitter than when I make rotund stuffed animals.

Though I am knitting an animal too... In any case. I'll post both projects as soon as they're done.

It's Official!

I have to admit I was the tiniest bit worried, since my brother officiated as a minister of the Universal Life Church and got ordained via email, but it looks like the State of Maine thinks I'm okay to be married for real.

Bus Book, Bed Book, Book Club

Sometime back in the spring I decided that I no longer read enough. I also decided that I was wasting my time on public transit with the Red Eye and gave it up for Lent to be replaced by real books. Resolved, I made my way over to the wonderful Harold Washington Library, picked up the Interpreter of Maladies and started a book reading frenzy. Since then, I've rarely been without at least two books checked out - a bed book and a bus book. One for home and one for my hour and a half of daily commute.

About the same time, a friend urned me to the website Goodreads, where I've been keeping track of and reviewing everything I read. Being one of those people who takes joy in lists, it's right up my alley. I'm a little behind on my reviews right now, but I highly recommend the site.

The bus book (currently East of Eden) is largely determined by weight. If it's too heavy it stays home. Books in fragile condition also miss the cut, but mostly, whichever book I want to get through first is the bus book - since it gets solid dedicated time 5 days a week.

The bed book (currently Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) usually takes me twice as long to get through as the bus book. Except for the Harry Potters I've been stealing from my now husband, which take two days. I also try to to mix it up so I'm reading one fiction and one non-fiction, or at least two different styles. I'm becoming increasingly interesting in pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing, so I'm self-educating in way.

Lastly, one of the books is now a book club. A few weeks before I left for the wedding, my friend Kasey and I met up at an ridiculously cute and francophiliac cafe, The Bourgeois Pig , prior to catching a comped performance of "An Intimate Evening with Lynda Carter." Just as we were about to leave, a small group of twenty-somethings started gathering for a book club. Kasey and I both looked at them wistfully and decided that we too should have a book club and meet in this charming locale to discuss.

Well, she was reading East of Eden and I had just brought my copy back from California, so it seemed a logical first choice - any Oprah book club connections aside. (Speaking of which, half the time her "selections" just seem like things I was required to read in high school -- Night, East of Eden, Anna Karenina, Sound and the Fury -- really? I'm so glad you discovered these for me Oprah, I never would have heard of them without you. )

Anyway, Kasey and I are both about halfway through the book now, so if anyone is a speedy reader, they're welcome to join in. I'm guessing we'll meet up mid-to-late November. After which, I hope this gets to be a reoccurring thing.

Speaking of Kasey, tonight was the second annual "William Shatner" apple pie baking fest -- this time with furniture! Photos and tasty pie recipe to come soon.