Let's play a game

First I totally admit this post is stolen from Notes from the Garden Spot of the World.

Next, let's play this game. I love to read - love it- and am always reading something. Last week it was The Bradley Method of Childbirth, over the weekend it was Eat Pray Love and Super Natural Cooking and this week it's Family Dinners.

The following list of books are the top 106 books tagged "unread" at LibraryThing . Let's see how well read we are.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
War and Peace
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
Pride and Prejudice
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler's Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault's Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Sound and the Fury
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver's Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela's Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley's Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Watership Down
Beowulf
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The history of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

Smells like an open house

Yes, it is what you think it is; warm, yeasty, crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside bread. Here's the deal: I took Martha's Baking Handbook out of the library the other day and have been perusing it daily, drooling and wishing for cold hands and more patience. Today I couldn't take it any more. I made my first cup of coffee and started out bright and early sifting my ingredients. I followed the recipe exactly, and everything was going well until I turned the dough out onto my board to begin kneading. Splat. So I added more flour. And kneaded. And added more flour. And kneaded. And added more flour, and more flour, and kneaded some more. This went on for quite a while. Finally, after much trial and error, I hit the right dough consistency; smooth, not sticky and pliable. I was thrilled - even baking isn't an exact science! Who knew? I might be hooked.

As American as...

I am not a baker. I'm not exact, I'm not measured and I'm definitely not predictable. I'm not that great at following directions, and I believe someones got to be different (and that's usually me).

But weirdly enough I want to be a baker. I dream of fresh loves of bread, with perfectly chewy interiors and crisp, crunchy crusts. I imagine holidays filled with savory, sweet pies, the house perfumed by wonderful, homey aromas of cinnamon and nutmeg. I buy book after book on baking, desserts and breadmaking and stare longingly at the pages. But I believe in change and growth and chances.

So I baked a pie.

It's not perfect; the crust didn't brown as much as I would have liked, and pastry is not my specialty, but it's a pie. And it'll taste fine.

And that's enough.

Long time no hear

Yes, I know, it's been forever. Some quick updates.

My sweetums celebrated a milestone birthday. To commemorate the occasion he requested a delicious meal of... Jack's Naturally Rising pizza, frozen corn and Jello No-bake cheesecake with Cherries. I tried not to consider it a comment on my cooking abilities.

I've been feeling rather creative this past week, which lead me to paint my bathroom orange and make these two fabulous items. (Yes, I said orange. It's awesome and I love it. You all shouldn't be so afraid to have some color in your lives.)

Curtain for bathroom

Super cute apron

I'm in love with Amy Butler's fabric (which is now available at Fields). I recently purchased one of her books, In Stitches, and have been making aprons like it's my job.

My garden has been kicking production into high gear - I've been giving lettuce away like nobody's business. Here are a few other things I picked this week:


I visited the beach for the first time in years with my friend Alicia, and let me say - you have got to go. Van Buren State Park is just south of South Haven - less busy, way less commercial and well, fabulous.


We're off to Traverse City tomorrow with the family. Hope you have a fun (and safe) holiday!