Now on sale . . . Muffins & Mayhem: Recipes for a Happy (if Disorderly) Life by Suzanne Beecher, and when you purchase it, request a free autographed bookplate, by visiting:
http://tinyurl.com/Muffins-MayhemPO
Join my email book club. Over 350,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/
Dear Reader,
Staying at home during my recent vacation was a deliberate decision. I wanted to see where my heart would lead me if there weren't any plans for each day. Notes from my vacation journal...
September 1, 2010
This is what a vacation day should feel like. At 9:30 this morning my neighbor John came down to the house. We had a date. He wanted to learn how to roll a piecrust and I offered my Never Fail Piecrust Recipe (the one in my book Muffins and Mayhem).
"The dough's always too sticky for me to roll it and it ends up a mess," John said.
But I assured him that just like the name says, "Never Fail" he'd never fail to roll this pie crust. You can roll it and reroll it, but the dough has to be chilled for at least three hours in the refrigerator. So the plan was to mix the dough in the morning and he'd return later in the afternoon to make a peach and blueberry pie.
When John and I bake together it's an exchange. I may be giving him a "how to roll a pie crust" lesson today, but he pushes me to be adventurous. Trying a brand new recipe, no need in John's mind to follow the instructions exactly as printed first time out. "How about if we do this instead Suzanne?"
Change it up a bit and see what we end up with. If things don't work out like we'd hoped, we eat the good parts and don't worry about what went wrong. Try again another day. Easy-going, aprons on, willing to make a big mess, just two grown up kids playing in the kitchen, and one of them learned how to roll a pie crust. Hmm, the peach pie was my favorite.
I had the feeling when I was writing about the funky chicken lamp, (in Wednesday's vacation column: http://tinyurl.com/0915column) that I should snap a photo. But the photo-snapper (my husband) had a bad cold, so I decided to run without a picture. I'm happy to report my photo-snapper is feeling much better, so the funky chicken and frog lamps are making their book club debuts today. No big story about Mr. Frog, but since the funky chicken has taken the frog's place on the writing table in my sunroom, I felt they both deserved recognition. Funny how things work out. I moved the frog lamp to an end table in the office, which turned out to be where the lamp should have been all along. The soft light from the frog lamp throws a comfortable, inviting hew over the room and looks so picturesque through the window.
To see the lamps and to enter a drawing for a Muffins and Mayhem cap, go to: http://www.muffinsandmayhem.com/node/6166
If you'd like an autographed bookplate for your copy of my book, go to: http://www.muffinsandmayhem.com/content/special-offers
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
www.MuffinsandMayhem.com
KIDSBUZZ: Books and books--lots of children's books to give away. Email an author, sign up for their giveaway and learn about great titles for kids of all ages from Patricia Lakin/MAX AND MO GO APPLE PICKING; Robert L. Forbes/LET'S HAVE A BITE! A Banquet of Beastly Rhymes; J.M. DeMatteis/IMAGINALIS; and Hugh Lupton/THE ADVENTURES OF ODYSSEUS. For a chance to win free books and more, see http://www.authorbuzz.com/kidsbuzz
* This month's Penguin Classics book is TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN AND MOTL THE CANTOR'S SON by Sholem Aleichem. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin totebag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/September10Classics
Recent Comments