I Read a Bunch More Books

 It's been a while since I checked in, but I've used that time to read several books. Since I want to be able to do my traditional count at the end of the year (I did not fill out an excel sheet this year, but really should have because doing it in 2019 gave a lot of interesting data), it's time we caught up on what I've been reading.

Revival, by Stephen King - I've found some of King's newer work to be less enjoyable, but this is a good, solid return to a more classic sort of King novel with hard times, supernatural menace, but the real stars of the story being regular people in irregular situations. I read this fairly quickly, but mostly because it was good and I wanted to see what would happen.

Date Me, Bryson Keller, by Kevin van Whye - This was below my reading level, but cute and charming. Bryson Keller, popular senior, has agreed to a bet where he must date the first person who asks him out on Monday morning for a week at a time. Kai Sheridan didn't think the bet would apply to boys or that Bryson would say yes, but now they're dating for a week even though Bryson is straight and Kai is about to get his heart broken... but maybe not?

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, by C.A. Fletcher - This post-apocalypse novel is actually the last book I bought in a Barnes and Noble in the Before Time, back in February, so it was interesting to finally get around to reading it deep into social distancing. Griz lives with his family and his dogs on a remote island off the coast of the United Kingdom (maybe off of Scotland? I'm bad at UK geography) many years after the end of civilization. They sometimes interact with another family many islands away, but for the most part keep to themselves until the day a trader comes, and leaves with one of Griz' dogs. Chasing after him in one of the family boats, the thief leads Griz on a chase through the remains of our world and an unexpected final twist. The only thing I didn't like about this book was that the author leans heavily into a "serialized story" kind of writing, where every chapter ends with an ominous mention of something terrible coming up.

Strange Weather by Joe Hill - This was the first in a string of short story collections over the past couple of months. I enjoy Hill's writing, and these stories were pretty entertaining. My favorite was one about a sky diver who crashes onto the top of a UFO disguised as a cloud, but everything in this book was pretty good.

The October Boys by Adam Millard - A friend suggested this, but it wasn't that great. In 1988, four boys are out trick or treating when they are pursued by a rusty ice cream truck in the middle of the night, and only three of them make it home. 27 years later, they are seeing the truck and hearing its jingle again, and they know the Ice Cream Man is coming back. There was an interesting idea here, but it doesn't feel like an original idea, and the back quarter of the book jams in a lot of sudden backstory to flesh the whole thing out. This isn't a bad book, but I forgot pretty much everything about it as soon as I was finished, and just had to read the summary on Amazon to remember the basics of the plot.

Don't Look Behind You by Lois Duncan - Somehow I had this on my unread books shelf, so I plowed through it in about a day, if that. This story of a family in witness protection, pursued by a hitman, would probably make a pretty good Lifetime movie since the teenage daughter is a brat who repeatedly compromises them and endangers their lives through her tantrums, and Lifetime loves bad teenagers. 

Just After Sunset by Stephen King - Another King book, and another short story collection. There are 13 stories here, and while they're not all about the supernatural they are all disturbing in some way. Again, in classic King tradition, the real monsters tend to be regular people, but there are also some good old fashioned monster monsters, too. I enjoyed this collection. 

Halloween Season by Lucy Snyder - A collection of stories and poems related to Halloween (some of them only loosely), this book is short but impactful. If you're familiar with Snyder's work (you should be, if you like short horror stories), then some of these will feel a little thematically familiar, but the writing is good and the stories are entertaining. Snyder has a skill for doing a lot of world building in a short amount of space without it feeling forced, and it leads to some very interesting tales.

The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates - I wasn't kidding when I said I went on a little "short story collection" binge. There's definite tension in these stories, and they're well written. The title story was, to me, one of the least interesting in the book, but overall this was a nice, diverting read.

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley - I impulse bought this at the store because I had heard a lot of good things about it, and it turned out to be a good mystery. A group of old college friends gets together every year for New Year's, and this year the celebration is taking place at a remote Scottish lodge, deep in the woods. By the end of the first chapter one of them is dead, but this is a double mystery, in that you spend most of the book trying to figure out who died and trying to figure out who killed them. You're pretty far into the story, told in the present day and in flashbacks to three days before, before you even get a pronoun on the corpse, but this approach works well. There are plenty of people in here who maybe should be murdered, and plenty of reasons for murdering them.

I read some more books

Sometimes I think about January. Remember January? It might be hard since it was about 85 years ago for many of us, but I remember that it was a completely different world where I went out to eat and got in my car and drove places and made plans to get on airplanes and went to movies and plays in theatres (possibly in theaters, as I am never sure which word I should use), and generally things were very different. One of the things I swore to do in January was get back to regular blogging, but doing so implies a regular existence, and it turns out that one thing is kind of hard without the other.

I also haven't been reading as much as I usually do during the pandemic. I have read a few things since the last time I updated, though, and there's very little else going on in lockdown (even though we're not officially in lockdown anymore; I'm just still staying home as a high risk person), so let's talk about the things I've read since the last time I talked about the things I've read, shall we?

I've always liked Dominick Dunne's books, so I read Robert Hofler's Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne thinking, "Oh, this will tell me more about his life while he was writing various things, and will offer insight," and it kind of did. It also told me, repeatedly, that Dominick Dunne had gay sex. A lot of gay sex. All the time. So much gay sex that Hofler seemed compelled to include as much of it as he could, even in places where including it was odd. You'd just be reading about him moving to a new city and buying a new apartment, and then all of a sudden it's like, "Dunne got a vintage designer living room set for the space at a Sotheby's auction, and then later wrote in his diary about doing lines of coke off of a male hooker's back before getting railed on the ottoman. He had lunch with Faye Dunaway the next day, and only ordered a salad." I know Dunne was gay, and I know that repressing that shaped his life and the way he wrote about some people, but wow, there was a lot of sex in this biography. As I said to a friend while reading it, "This biography of Dominick Dunne reads like a book by Dominick Dunne," and maybe that was the point.

I was picking over my "unread books" shelf and thought, "I've had this copy of Peter Straub's In The Night Room for a while. Maybe I should read it." As it turns out, based on the receipt I found tucked in the front cover, "for a while" means I bought this book 14 years ago in 2006, when I still lived in Albany. Talk about the world being very different... Anyway, I got kind of bored reading this. There are Peter Straub books that I like and immediately get into reading, and there are Peter Straub books that feel like I was assigned them for a class I don't want to be in, and this was definitely the second kind. Even the twist, which I should have found interesting, just landed kind of flat.

On the other hand, maybe I couldn't get through that book because I knew that Stephenie Meyer's Midnight Sun was waiting patiently for me on the coffee table, and I couldn't wait to throw myself back into the world of vampire insanity. Let me tell you: everything you hated while you were hate-reading the entire Twilight saga (except "Good and Evil", which we are apparently all politely ignoring based on the back of the book:



) is still here for you to hate, but also... THERE'S EVEN MORE! I'm going to just split this out into some highlights:

1) There's still no reason why Edward and Bella fall in love. If you remember reading the original and thinking, "Why does she just suddenly love him?", then wait until you read this story from Edward's point of view and find out that he doesn't know either. They just meet in biology class and they're in love, and that's it.

2) Edward really hates Mike and Jessica. Like, a lot. He hates them so much that his mental monologue sounds like Joe thinking about Peach Salinger on You. I don't remember if he ever mentioned to Bella in the original series how much venomous bile (not to be confused with the venom that constantly floods his mouth around Bella because they're in love) he has for those two, but he hates them to a level that even I, a person who checks my high school yearbooks to see if someone has a black X over their face before I accept friend requests, was amused and concerned. 95% of this book is really about how Edward, a 100 year old man deeply in love with a literal child, needs pyschological help way more than he needs a girlfriend.

3) Bella smells so good, intoxicatingly good, to Edward, but he never tells us exactly what that smell is like even though he mentions it on every page, sometimes multiple times on the same page. Since he's a vampire and he's smelling her blood, is it food based? Like she smells like maple syrup? Merlot? Buttercream (my all time favorite discontinued Yankee Candle scent)? We'll never know. We'll just know she smells. Also, because he's smelling her blood and is suddenly in love with her, all I can think about every time he says it is Margaret White ranting to Carrie about, "First comes the blood, then the boys, comin' for that smell! To find out what that smell is!" and I doubt that's the feeling Meyer was going for.

4) The cover design is terrible. I get the whole pomegranate metaphor (if I didn't, Edward spells it out in literal terms in the story, because that's the reading level these books are designed for), but it's visually unattractive. The front of the book is not appealing. In short, this already deeply flawed "romance" is not improved by knowing what Edward was thinking the whole time.

I wanted a palate cleanser from garbage, so after the Twilight book I read Mitch Landrieu's In The Shadow of Statues, which seemed especially fitting in light of recent events. Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans and lieutenant governor of Louisianna, talks about his lifelong journey toward understanding racism and his part in it, culminating in his long and ultimately successful battle to remove Confederate monuments from the streets of New Orleans. He also talks a lot about Hurrican Katrina and the aftermath, which opens a discussion about racism and classism in politics, and how the two are almost always linked. This was an interesting read.

I wrapped up my recent reading with Maria Sherman's Larger Than Life, a fun history of boy bands from the 1950s up until now, which my friend Kristin sent me. A breezy, entertaining read, there actually is a lot of history of the music business in here, some fashion and marketing critique, and an interesting discussion about how product consumed mostly by young women is viewed by society. I liked this a lot, too.

Now I'm halfway through a Stephen King book, because my friend Jackie went on a Stephen King kick, so I guess I'll be writing about that eventually.

More Lockdown Reading

I swore that this was the year I was going to get back to blogging, but it turns out that being in lockdown and going on a low carb diet where you rarely cook anything fun or exciting doesn't really leave a lot to blog about. My friends think that I'm reading a ton, but I have to admit that sometimes it's been a little difficult to focus on reading. Sometimes I just sit and watch TV, something I never used to do, and sometimes I just go to bed at 9 PM because I'm just done for the day.

I'm still reading some stuff, though, so here's a list of the books that I've read since April and a few thoughts about them:

Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman, is exactly what it says it is: a collection of stories from Norse mythology. Most of the reason I read this was as a companion to that reading of "The Mighty Thor" that I did a few months ago. I like the Thor movies, and I love "The Mighty Thor", so it was nice to read something that adds a little depth to both of those things that I already liked, and Neil Gaiman's writing is always a pleasure.

Growing Things and Other Stories, by Paul Tremblay, was a collection of somewhat unsettling, often disturbing short stories. Some of the stories tie into his novels, which I've started to become a fan of, but most of them are stand-alone short works. Oddly, I thought the title story was one of the weaker ones, but overall this was a decent collection of things to read in small bites, and might be great if you like horror but have trouble concentrating right now. On the other hand, we're starting to live in a story that could be in this book, so maybe it's not really the best idea.

Some Hell, by Patrick Nathan, tells the story of a family dissolving after the father's suicide. He leaves behind a collection of notebooks, and as the family members secretly read them to try to understand, they spiral in different, but equally destructive, directions. I'm going to go ahead and give a spoiler about the ending, though, so skip to the next paragraph now if you don't want to know what I think. OK, if you're still here, I have to tell you that the ending is a huge let down, because it feels like the author didn't know where to go. Everyone is at a crisis point, and then they suddenly all die in an earthquake, and that's the end.

I've never read fiction by Roxanne Gay before, and I didn't read the dust jacket for Difficult Women, so I didn't realize that this was a collection of short stories. The first one is told in the first person, and I was reading it thinking, "Oh my God, I had no idea she survived this kind of trauma. How did this not come up when I read that other book by her?", but then someone used the narrator's first name and I was like, "Oh. I'm stupid." The women in these stories are labeled difficult, but most of them were just women trying to live their lives in the face of adversity.

I went into The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games" prequel, with reservations, because I was worried that this story was going to be an attempt to paint President Snow, one of the villains of the previous books, as sympathetic and misunderstood. At first, it seems like that is the story that Collins is telling, on the surface, but the deeper into this you get, the more you see that she subtly chips away at that message. Snow talks continuously about how the wealthy Capitol citizens suffered through the war, trying to put them on the same level of sympathy as the poverty stricken Districts, but there's also a constant series of references to an incident where one of his rich neighbor families eats their maid. The rich literally eat the poor to survive, and Collins makes sure you never forget that through the book. Snow is lauded for being well-bred and honorable, but he also cheats, lies, and sells out his fiends at every turn, convincing himself that he's doing it in service of a higher good. Snow might come out of this book thinking he's a good person, but the reader doesn't, and I'm ok with that.


Beautiful You, by Chuck Palahniuk, had a lot of sex, but you can't really tell the story of a Steve Jobs type who tries to take over the world with nanite-infested sex toys without a lot of sex. Most of the sex is very clinical, and some of it definitely borders on distasteful, but it's a Palahniuk book and in this case it's also kind of the point.

Now, let me do you a favor: don't bother buying or even reading the free version of John Bolton's The Room Where It Happened. It's dull. All the good parts have already been covered by the media, leaving behind 500 pages of boring.

This weekend I finished Carol Goodman's The Sea of Lost Girls, and it was comforting in the same way that Mary Higgins Clark's books are comforting. If you've read a few, you know what you're getting: a solid, entertaining read with a few themes in common with her other books. There's always a mysterious death in the past that has some sort of ties to a death in the present, a female protagonist is always in danger, things are never what they seem, and there's usually a secret baby somewhere along the way. All the books don't have these elements, but they have enough of them that if you like them, you like each book the author gives you, and I like Goodman's books. Oddly, I always think, "This would be a great read for a plane," but I don't think I've ever read one while traveling.

Now, we're halfway through the year and I'm only at 21 books. I'm going to have to pick things up a little if we're getting to 52, but I'm on track to beat last year's total, so... fingers crossed, but not crossed so much that I can't turn pages.

The Comics of Lockdown

New comics are about to return the comic store, after several weeks of absence during the current lockdown situations. My store mailed me the last couple of weeks' worth of books before publishing and delivery ceased, and I supported them during the closure by purchasing a large gift card to help keep money coming in. Now that things are starting up again, the gift card will give me a few more weeks worth of books, which they will also mail, but this long absence from reading new books has given me and my comic reading friends some time to catch up on beloved older books or to check out books that we hadn't read before.

So, what have I been reading? Well, in no particular order:

Check, Please! Book 2, by Ngozi Ukazu. Even though this is a web series, I somehow held out from reading the series and instead have been waiting for this book since my friend George sent me the first one a year or so ago. This was worth the wait, and I'm not kidding when I say I laughed, I cried (a lot; this thing had my emotions all over the place), and I read it again as soon as I finished.

The series follows the four year college journey of Eric "Bitty" Bittle, the figure skating son of a football coach. He's an expert baker, and walks onto the university hockey team due to his speed and spins, but is also hampered by his fear of physical contact on the ice. There are mixed reviews on Amazon, because some people are jackholes about profanity and gay relationships, but as a person who enjoys hockey, college settings, baking, and dynamic art styles, this book is wonderful. Reading the first one made me happy, and reading the second made me happier. I really cannot say enough good things about this.

Gotham High by Melissa De La Cruz. Boy was this a lot of noise about nothing. A reimagining of the Batman universe as a high school where Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle, Jack Napier, and Harvey Dent are students, the racist and homophobic portions of the Bat-universe fanbase were all up in arms before this came out because a) almost every character is a racial or sexual minority in the story, and b) it was originally reported that many characters in the book would be sexually fluid, and that Bruce and Jack (Batman and the Joker) would "cross boundaries" during a threeway with Selina (Catwoman). That doesn't actually happen in the book. Really, this is just a regular Batman story of kidnappings, robbery, forgery, and other crimes both petty and major, in a slightly different setting. The art is decent, and the story is entertaining, but I was hoping for all the allegedly shocking controversy, so I was disappointed.

All seven paperbacks of the Mighty Thor, by Jason Aaron. Some of this was prep for the next Thor movie, and some of it was just because this is an outstanding run of comics. If you're not familiar, at the start of the run the Odinson has lost the power to lift Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor. Things are looking dire, when suddenly a new Thor appears and she's lifting the hammer just fine. Who is she? Where did she come from? Since this series is now a few years old, I'll go ahead and give the rest of the spoiler:

The new Thor is Dr. Jane Foster, and she has a problem. She's dying of cancer, and every time she lifts the hammer and becomes Thor she is healed of her chemotherapy, which means that being the mighty Thor is slowly killing her. This puts a ticking clock on the whole series, even as a ticking clock is also placed on Thor and the gods of Asgard, as the destroyer of gods is slowly coming for them. All that stands between them and oblivion is the mighty Thor, but she also stands on the brink of death. This is a story of heroism, sacrifice, family, and acceptance, as well as good old fashioned superheroes punching things. Also, the loss of his hammer leaves the Odinson with a costume of cape, pants, and no shirt, so there's also a lot of this:



Truly, a comic with something for everybody. I can only hope this is the costume they go with for Chris Hemsworth in the next movie.

Midnight Nation by J. Michael Straczynski. This was a reread of the first comic I ever bought monthly that wasn't about superheroes. It's a story of loss and redemption starring police officer David Grey, who sees something unexplainable on a call and finds himself on a journey across America's forgotten underside to save his soul, accompanied by a woman who might be an angel or might be a devil meant to lead him to his fate. This was right when Gary Frank's art was in the "very realistic" phase but right before it slipped into "everyone has a grinning rictus of terror and looks at least 40 years older than they should" phase, so it tells the story well. I don't see this book referenced a lot, which is sad because it's really well done.

Orbiter, by Warren Ellis. The space shuttle Venture, missing in space for ten years, crash lands in Florida. It's covered in alien technology, and only one mute crew member remains inside. Where have they been? What happened to them? Why have they returned? Can the trio of specialists brought in to discover the truth solve the mystery? What does it mean for humanity if they do? This is a good science fiction story, and Colleen Doran's art is great. Again, I rarely if ever see people talk about this book, which is sad because it's good.

As for what's next on the comic reading list, I haven't decided yet, but I have a few more things sitting around waiting to be read.

Books and a Snack

"You must be reading so much during quarantine!"

Someone said this to me the other day, and I'm not sure that all of my friends get that "working from home" doesn't mean "laying around on my couch reading books". I am reading some, though, and the last time I counted up books for my year end tally was at the end of February, so here's everything I've read since then:

Movies (And Other Things) by Shea Serrano is a funny walk through a bunch of movies that Shea and I apparently have in common as favorites. Each chapter asks a question (Who had the worst death in "Kill Bill"? Did the Rockford Peaches make the right decision trading Kit? If all the high school movies were one movie, who would Regina George's friends be?) and then argues the way to the answer along with some funny illustrations. There are some thoughtful points here, and also some reminders that I should see some of these movies again if it's been too long since last time I did.

I like Robert R. McCammon, but Tales from Greystone Bay is too short. Each of the short stories here is a little interesting, but there are only three in the whole book, so I read it in less than a day. All three stories could have been fleshed out a little more, into novellas, and this would have been a lot better.

Harbor, by John Ajvide Lindquist, is an odd sort of horror story, starting out with an ordinary family and slowly building to ancient god-monsters, ghosts, human sacrifice, and destruction. In the middle of Scandinavian winter, Anders and Cecelia take their daughter, Maja, across the frozen channel to see the lighthouse. Somewhere on the way home, in clear weather and with their backs turned for only a second, Maja vanishes. Anders returns to the island a few years later, drunk and broken, and discovers that Maja isn't the only one to disappear from the village, but instead that one person disappears into the sea every year, and has for hundreds of years. There's also a weird subplot about a magic symbiotic insect that lets the host control water, which is the part of this that was really odd. This was marketed as horror, but not really scary or disturbing.

The Fortress at the End of Time, by Joe McDermott, was much more interesting. The entire novel is a long confession from Ronaldo Aldo, an Ensign from Earth stationed at the Citadel, the farthest human colony. Humanity is connected by the Ansible, a faster than light link that lets them transmit things and people along its length, sort of: patterns are sent along to Ansible and then assembled out of raw materials at the other end, so Aldo is actually a clone of Aldo, and if he gets promoted off of the Citadel, the Aldo sent to the next colony will be another clone, leaving the original and the Citadel clone behind. The Citadel is the last outpost of a century old galactic war, forever listening for the enemy's return, and Aldo will do anything to escape from it. As his confession unfolds, we find out exactly how much of anything.

Lev Grossman's Warp is a non-event. The story of Hollis, a recent college graduate still living near his school and struggling to force himself to get a job and become an adult, is like a worse version of "Catcher in the Rye", a feat I didn't think possible.

F. Paul Wilson's The Keep pits evil against evil in the Romanian alps of World War II. A garrison of Nazi soldiers is warned by the village not to spend the night in the Keep, the ancient fortress towering above them, but the soldiers pay them no mind. By the end of the first night, two soldiers are dead, and another dies each night, killed by an enemy that moves through shadows and drains them of blood. Trapped in the middle of the struggle, a Jewish professor of folklore and his daughter must decide whether to side with the evil of the supernatural or the evil of humanity without becoming monsters themselves.

Masked, a story collection edited by Lou Anders, is a fantastic set of superhero stories, written by some of the biggest names in the industry. Authors include Gail Simone, Bill Willingham, Mike Carey, Peter David, and more, and all of the characters are originals. There are some great stories in here, and the one that finishes the book was amazing.

Like I said at the beginning, though, reading isn't all I've been doing. I've also been sitting at my new desk a lot for work. Since my new desk is right next to my kitchen, a problem a lot of my friends are having (I'm not naming names, but one of my friends set up her work from home station on the second floor so that every time she contemplates getting a snack she has to decide if it's worth a trip up and down the stairs), I'm struggling with the idea of having snacks only feet away. I'm also trying to eat better in isolation, going lower carb and looking for healthy snacks, and I landed on nuts. I'm allergic to some kind of nuts, but I love peanuts and cashews. In perusing the nut selection at Kroger, though, I discovered that getting spiced, flavored nuts adds a dollar or two per can, and I can just do that myself for cheap.

So...

Homemade Spiced Nuts

1 egg white
2 cups nuts (unsalted or lightly salted)
1 tablespoon brown sugar (the recipe called for 3, but like I said I'm trying to cut back on carbs)
4 tablespoons total of spices

You can use whatever kind of spices you want. The recipe wanted oregano, thyme, parsley, and chili powder, but again, this is up to you and what you have in the cabinet. This time, I wanted something mustard based, and a lot of recipes pair mustard with cinnamon, so I went with dry mustard, cinnamon, nutmeg, and Chinese 5 spice:



Preheat your oven to 250 F.

Mix the egg white into the spices:



and then add the nuts and stir them around to get them really coated:



Spread your nuts out on a cookie sheet:



Bake for 15 minutes, then stir them around a little on the sheet (some of them might be stuck together, so break them up a little with the spatula), bake for 15 more minutes, stir again, then bake for 15 more minutes and take them out. They'll be hot and soft, so leave them alone on the cookie sheet for 15 more minutes, then put them into a container:



and you have homemade spiced nuts. The recipe said they will keep for 5 days as long as you keep a lid on your container, but these aren't going to last five days.

If you're wondering how mine turned out, they're good, but I can't taste the mustard at all, and it might have been a bit of a waste. They're still good, though, and I've been munching a handful every time I pass my desk even though they are supposed to be for work this week.

For the next batch, I'm thinking of going for an Indian sort of mix, with curry, ginger, and garam masala. That should be low key delicious.

The Rainbow Ribbon Mold

We get Good Friday off from work. We don't call it Good Friday, because there's a separation of church and state, so instead we actually get Spring Recess off. It's a floating holiday that always just happens to land on Good Friday every year, but never happens to land on Passover, Purim, Vesak, or any other religious holiday that occurs in Spring. There also aren't any floating holidays on our calendars that land on those days, so we don't get them off.

Since we had Friday off, for whatever reason, I spent the morning assembling a desk to take zoom calls at, rather than taking zoom calls. Working from home has been an interesting experience so far, but I really needed a work space, rather than a recliner and TV tray. I don't have a dining room set, because I live alone, so I ordered a folding table from Amazon. Amazon shipped my folding table from Indianapolis to Nashville, and then lost track of it on the three hour drive from Nashville to Knoxville, so after they refunded it I ordered a desk that I put together on Friday morning. I only hit myself in the head with a piece of the desk one time, so assembly went fairly well.

Now that I have a desk, I've suddenly started eating at it, and feeling like I need to sit at it and do projects and things. Since I didn't want to do work on the weekend, as I am trying really hard to separate work activities and home activities while both are taking place in the same place, I looked around my apartment for other projects I could do at my desk.

Rather than write a novel, I decided to make Jello.

Like most totally normal home cooks, I have ten Jello cookbooks, dating back several decades. In reading them at my desk, I noticed two important things:



1) Almost all of them feature the Rainbow Ribbon Mold, and

2) the Rainbow Ribbon Mold only requires two ingredients, which I have here in the house during lockdown.

The Rainbow Ribbon Mold recipe calls for 5 flavors of Jello and sour cream, although you could make it in five layers with the same flavor of Jello as long as you have five boxes. The only real challenge to the recipe is the time and patience required, and God knows that now is a great time to work on patience.

I assembled my five boxes of Jello (I had six, in case the mold turned out to be bigger than I thought, but it turned out to be smaller, so I only got through ROYG, rather than ROYGBV) my mold, a Tupperware Jello mold that my friend Donna sent me a few years ago, when I was experimenting with Jello more often, and a collection of measuring cups of various sizes for easy microwaving and pouring.

The recipe is fairly easy: you make a box of Jello (using less water than the box instructions specify so that your Jello stays firm), and then half of it goes into the mold to set in a layer. The other half gets mixed with a few tablespoons of sour cream, to make a color-tinted creamy layer, and when the first half is set you spoon the creamy layer on top of the clear layer. After the creamy layer sets, you repeat the process.

Being an impatient person who needs to learn patience, I tried to rush the first layer setting by putting the mold in an ice bath. The mold would float evenly, though, so I had to give up on this idea or else end up with badly crooked layers.



Instead, I got a book, and started setting the timer, over and over, figuring out from the red layers how long it would be:



After the red layer, I fell into a routine:

1) Microwave water for clear layer. Mix in Jello, and put that container in the fridge for about twenty minutes.

2) Check consistency of foam layer by dropping one droplet of clear onto it. If it's ready, measure out clear layer, then carefully add it to the mold. Do not pour it directly into the mold, because the force of the pour may punch through the foam layer. Either spoon it in, or pour it onto a spoon over the mold to blunt the pour.

3) Put the rest of the clear in the fridge for ten minutes. Microwave and mix the next color, and let it cool on the counter for a bit.

4) Take out the rest of the current clear layer and mix in the sour cream to make the next foam layer. Set timer for ten more minutes, but do not put foam layer back in fridge or it will firm up too much.





5) Check consistency of the clear layer in the mold, and add foam layer. Set timer for ten more minutes.

6) After ten minutes, put the next color in the fridge and set the timer for ten more minutes. Wash the measuring cup you used for the foam layer you just added. I used a 4 cup and an 8 cup to mix the Jello in, and a one cup for other measuring.

7) You're now back at Step 2.

The mold stays in the fridge almost the entire time, and after the first layer the setting time between layers is a little shorter because you're putting the Jello onto a cold surface. Even with all that, you may need a few extra minutes on each set based on your fridge. When I finally finished all the layers, I put the lid on the mold and ignored it for six hours.

And then it was time to unmold.

To unmold, you dip the mold into a bowl of hot water for a few seconds, but that's the tricky part: too long in the hot water, and your Jello starts to melt. Too short, and it won't release from the mold. You have to try to guess as best you can in an interval of only 5 to 10 seconds, and sometimes you hit it and sometimes you don't. I dipped, put a plate over the top of the mold, and turned it over.



Layers! Red, orange, yellow, and green! If I'd used my Bundt pan, which is deeper, I would have gotten blue in there, too. The mold still wasn't out of the mold, though. Would my layers survive?

I didn't quite dip long enough. A little of the green foam, which was the bottom layer on the plate after being the top layer in the mold:



came off and stuck to the mold.



Still, I think I was pretty successful with my showstopper.





Several friends asked how it tastes, and it just tastes like fruity Jello. The sour cream has no flavor at all, most likely because the flavor of Jello is so strong, and you can't really taste the individual Jello flavors when you're getting several in each bite. If you use the sugar-free Jello, this probably even counts as diet food.

Just be sure you have a book and a lot of time to sit around between settings.

Dueling Bread Bakes

Are you making banana bread this weekend?

I'm asking because it seems like everyone's quarantine bananas went past ripe at the same time this week, since five people I know were making banana bread yesterday. I found out because I was also making banana bread yesterday, and when I mentioned it in texts or on social media, everyone else chimed in. My friend Kathryn and I compared recipes, and ended up both using the same one, a basic, easy to follow recipe from the Food Network. Kathryn decided to put chocolate chips in hers, and I opted not to, but other than that we both followed the same recipe.

When we compared breads, though, an odd thing happened.

Kathryn's bread:



is much lighter in color than my bread:



Both of us were very intrigued by this, so we started comparing notes.

Pan: Kathryn used a metal pan, and I used a vintage glass Pyrex pan. I don't have any metal loaf pans, and Kathryn doesn't have any glass ones.

Baking time: I baked mine for an hour and ten minutes, and Kathryn baked hers for an hour.

Cooling time: Kathryn cooled hers for fifteen minutes in the pan, then for 45 minutes on a cooling rack. I cooled mine for an hour in the pan.

Other than those three things, we couldn't spot any other differences, so today we turned to our friend Stacy, a much better and more experienced baker than me and, possibly, Kathryn. (I don't want to say for sure that Stacy is a better baker than Kathryn because I've never directly compared, so we'll just say she's better than me and leave it there.) Stacy offered the following ideas:

1) Different baking times are definitely a factor.

2) Even though we both set our ovens to what we think is the same temperature, our ovens are not precisely calibrated, and there may actually be differences. This never occurred to me, but it makes sense.

3) One of us may have had riper bananas, which would have more sugar.

4) The chocolate chips increased the volume of Kathryn's loaf, so we should have had different baking times. Stacy thinks Kathryn should have had a longer baking time, not a shorter one, which could support the idea that our oven temperatures are a little different, or raises the possibility that mine may actually be a little bit overbaked. (I raised that possibility. Stacy did not.)

Both of us agree that our bread tastes good, but we both live alone, so there are no second opinions.

You'll have to take our word for it.

"Gotta use up this flour..."

Back at the beginning of the month, which seems an incredibly distant time in light of current circumstances but turns out to be less than 30 days ago, I baked a fancy banana bread for my friends. They enjoyed it, and ate it all, but it used up almost all of the flour I had in the house. I added flour to my grocery list without a second thought, but that was the week when Knoxville decided to start panic buying, and it has taken until this past Wednesday to have flour in stock at Kroger again.

The last bag of flour.

It turned out to be a 5 pound bag, which is larger than my flour cannister will hold. I'm sure there are people who just sit the bag of flour in their cabinet and think nothing of it, but I'm always worried that if I leave the flour just sitting in the bag then bugs of some kind (weevils? mites? centipedes, which are not a bug but are an arthropod?) will get into it, even though I've never seen a bug in my kitchen. Unwilling to leave this flour just sitting out as an insect buffet after I waited almost a month to be able to buy it, I decided that I would use it up this weekend instead.

The first thing I made was scones. I've been using the same scone recipe since 2011, but my recipe is for pear and goat cheese scones, and I didn't have any pears in the house. I did have an apple, though, so I decided on apple cheddar scones instead.

I chunked up my apple:



peeled and finely diced it, and lumped everything into my scone batter:



and baked them. I didn't bother shaping them, and instead just made them like haystacks of dough:



and they came out fine.

That didn't use up enough flour, though, so I thought about what else I could make, and decided on a quick bread. Years ago, Food Network Magazine published a 50 Quick Breads recipe guide in the magazine, and I've never gone wrong using it. I looked around the pantry and saw half a bag of dried figs leftover from when I made a flatbread with figs on it and an almost empty bottle of honey (I had a spare right behind it), so I decided to make the honey bread (number 30) and add the figs to it. Calling this a bread is misleading, though, because it's really a fig and honey poundcake.

The batter came together quickly and fairly easily, and then I decided to try something new. Every time I make a bread with things in it, most of the things sink to the bottom. I've seen people on Food Network talk about how you have to toss your add ins in flour, so that they suspend in the dough rather than sinking, but I've never actually tried it. I saved back an eighth of a cup of the flour that was supposed to go into the batter and tossed the diced figs in it:



The figs were folded into the batter, the batter went into the loaf pan:



(Look! You can see figs floating near the top!) and it worked:



Fig and honey bread with figs in pretty much every bite. I can't really taste the honey, but I can taste the figs, and I love figs, so this is delicious. Next time I have dinner at a friend's house I might even bring this as dessert.

I figured this was enough baking, and decided to pause until Sunday.

This morning I was originally planning to make chocolate chip cookies, but they called for a lot of eggs, and I was worried about using up too many eggs in one weekend. I also used a crap ton of butter this weekend between the baking and a lemon pasta dish, but I had extra butter in the freezer, so I wasn't as worried about that. Changing gears, I decided to make shortbread cookies instead, because I've made them once before, they use the same amount of butter and flour as the chocolate chip cookies, and they only use one egg.

I couldn't remember what recipe I used when I made these before, but a quick google search turned up this really easy one, and it mostly worked with one minor snag.

After mixing up the dough:



I went to eject the mixer blades so I could get the dough out of them, and I accidentally hit spin instead. Little pieces of dough, all over the counter and the stove:



I guess it got mixed a little more than I intended it to.

I got the dough back together in the bowl, pressing it into a ball with my hands, and then dumped it onto my floured countertop. Learning from my recent troubles with piecrust I floured my rolling pin and rolled the dough out to the right thickness. Once that was done, I used my hands to shape it into a square to cut out evenly sized cookies:



I cut them into triangles and got them to the cookie sheet with a minimum of trouble, then separated an egg to make an egg white wash for the top:



The recipe said to put sanding sugar on top, but I didn't have any. I did have leftover gold colored sugar from making Unicorn Fudge a few years ago, so I used that instead, and it actually came out really pretty:



It's sparkly and shiny, and gave the tops a nice crunch.

Tomorrow night, I'll probably make some banana bread, because I have bananas to use up, too.

A Greek Tragedy on Pi Day

So many of the best Greek tragedies, and really tragedies in general, rest on the idea of hubris. Generally one thinks of hubris, if one thinks of it at all, as a folly of youth, but I'm here to tell you a tale of hubris from yesterday morning, starring me and a pie crust.

Our story begins, as so many do, with a tiny act. See, a few months ago I bought my friend a Harry Potter spatula at Williams Sonoma, and let them email my receipt rather than printing a paper one. Since that day, I receive one to three emails from Williams Sonoma a day telling me about sales and reasons why I should rush to their store to by four hundred dollar toasters and hundred dollar mixing bowls. Yesterday morning, for Pi Day, they sent me one about "6 Pie Essentials", which I casually deleted and then tweeted about.

Thanks for your thoughtful email, Williams Sonoma, but I don't really need 6 pie-making essentials right now.

Please email when you have toilet paper.

The stage is now set to move on with our story.

Around lunch time yesterday, after a morning of cleaning, laundry, reading, and video games, I realized that I didn't have any pie to celebrate Pi Day. I thought about running to the store to pick up a small one, but then remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and trying to stay in my apartment instead of running out to the store whenever the impulse hits me.

"What if I just made a pie?" I thought, surveying the contents of my cabinets. Mixed in with a dozen boxes of Jello, I noticed a box of instant chocolate pudding and pie filling. "All I need, really, is a pie crust. People make pie crust all the time. How hard can it be? I mean, I own a hundred cookbooks. One of them must have a recipe."

So, hours after casually mocking the idea that there are pie essentials that I might need help with (making pie crust is probably one of them), I decide to make a pie.

Hubris.

Now, on with our tragedy. I started by surveying the book case where I keep most of my cookbooks:



My parents got that bookcase as a wedding gift. It has survived a dozen moves over the years, and the only damage is a chip in the corner of one of the sliding door panels. It holds most of my cookbooks, although there is a shelf of overflow cookbooks in the second bedroom, which I sometimes grandly refer to as The Library. I picked through for a few minutes, and found a basic recipe for pie crust. I had all the ingredients, so I preheated the oven and got started on the pie crust.

The recipe said that the butter needed to be really cold, so I cubed it and then put it in the freezer for ten minutes:



Then I prepared to cut the butter into the flour and salt:



After adding the ice cold water, the recipe insisted that I now had pie dough.



It didn't look like pie dough. It looked like a pile of sad ruins, but I had now used butter and flour on it during our time of social distance, which meant I shouldn't waste it to just make pudding. I soldiered onward, and followed the instructions, which said to roll out my dough.



The recipe gave no indication that the dough could stick to the rolling pin. When I talked to my mom this morning about it she casually said, "Oh, you didn't put enough flour on your rolling pin," but the recipe didn't say to put any flour on the rolling pin. I pointed this out, and mom added, "Everyone knows you put flour on the rolling pin."

I guess everyone doesn't know, but maybe it was one of the six essential tips that I, in my hubris, deleted and mocked.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to roll out the dough, and just plopped it into the pan and pressed it into shape with my fingers.



This is not ideal pie crust.

I baked it anyway and it came out even worse.



Actual bakers are probably staring at that in horror, but I was all in at this point. I waited for it to cool, then filled it with my newly mixed chocolate pie filling and put it in the fridge. The finished product looked mostly like a pie, with sloppy edges.



It sliced right up, though:





and it tastes fine.

It would probably taste a little better if I'd followed those six essential pie tips, though.

Water into Wine(flavored)

We live in exciting times, as far as food goes. Or, more correctly, as far as "food" goes, as I'm not sure some of the things I am often excited about in the grocery store actually qualify as "food", technically. I'm not talking about things like exotic fruit from the far side of the world or a soup you've never tried or a new sauce for chicken. I'm talking about things like Peeps milk, or Cheelows, or the return to popularity of exotic Jello molds and desserts. And, yes, I'm also talking about Wal-Mart's wine-flavored water enhancers.

Earlier this week a friend posted an article about them on Facebook, but the article didn't seem to know that Rose Wine isn't the only flavor. When I made an actual trip to Walmart on Friday night (because that's the kind of fun we get into around here on a Friday night), I discovered that they also make a Berry Sangria flavor. As a person who drinks water all day long at my desk, and a person who likes wine, I decided that I needed to try these.

But also that I needed some actual wine to compare them to, in order to properly evaluate the flavor.

I'm told that day drinking wine alone in your apartment on the weekend is a sign of several different but severe problems, so I immediately rationalized two good excuses:

1) I have to drink this in order to properly blog about it. I am performing a service for my few dozen readers. Taking one for the team. Some kind of sports metaphor. I'm not day drinking alone on the couch. I'm [SPORTS METAPHOR HERE] for my friends and readers.

2) If you have wine with a cheese plate, you're not drinking; you're fancy. The $5 and under cheese bin at Kroger was happy to help me with this, so I assembled a cheese plate with some crackers and accompaniments (by which I mean jelly, to keep the cheese from sliding off the cracker) and prepared for my taste test.



Said preparation consisted of letting the cheese sit out for an hour and getting out two glasses.

Like I said, fancy.

I decided to start with the Rose Wine flavor, as that was the one discussed in the article.



(If you're wondering why the wine glass has a bicentennial design on it, all of my barware comes from a matched set that was in my Nanny Maggie's house. No one else wanted it, and I have successfully move it three times now without breaking any.)

I wasn't sure how much flavoring to add to just one glass of water (at work I have a water bottle, so I'm flavoring a much larger quantity), so I figured for a proper test I would go ahead and add flavoring until it was about the same color as the actual rose wine spritzer I bought at Walmart.

(Yes, I bought wine at Walmart. As I said, fancy.)



Before sipping, I attempted to savor the bouquet, but the rose-flavored water had no smell at all. It really did taste like wine, although without the noticeable bite/sting of alcohol. I'm not saying it tasted like good wine, mind you. It tasted more like I imagine the wine that Schmendrick makes in "The Last Unicorn" tastes; weak, non-offensive, but definitely something wine-flavored. If you were blindfolded and given a glass of this, I'm fairly confident you'd be able to guess "wine" as the flavor, but not a specific kind of wine.

Satisfied that I had properly evaluated the rose flavor, I slammed the remainder of the glass of rose and cleansed my pallet with several bites of cheese and crackers. Then we moved on to the Berry Sangria flavor:



Like the first test, I added enough until the colors matched:



and then sipped the actual wine, and then the water, to compare.

The berry sangria water has a faint smell of berries. I wondered if maybe I hadn't added enough flavor to the first one, or if maybe I was tipsy from the first round. (Confession: I drank all the wine from the first round, but only a couple sips of the water.) Even more importantly, though, it definitely tasted like the sangria. Out of the two flavors, I would say this one is definitely the better choice if you want to sit at your desk and pretend that you are slowly drinking your day away.

Or if you just like the taste of wine.

It's also good for that.

Books and Baking Banana Bread for Brunch

Earlier in the week I saw this recipe for chocolate peanut butter banana bread, and was intrigued. I shared it to Facebook, and the reaction from my friends ranged between also intrigued and concerned. My friend Sean expressed doubt about the flavor combination, and I pointed out that peanut butter and banana sandwiches were Elvis' favorite.

And also killed him.

Technically, that's probably more the fault of the sandwich preparation than it is the fault of the flavor combination. After all, according to the potholders for sale at the Graceland gift shop, every sandwich took an entire stick of butter.



That's why Elvis is dead. Four or five sticks of butter a day.

Anyway, by a happy coincidence I had some friends coming in from out of town this weekend, and they rented an entire house from Airbnb and invited many of us to brunch today. This offered the perfect opportunity to bake the bread but then not have the bread hanging around my house waiting to be eaten all week, so this morning I got to work.

When cooking anything, I like to take out all of the ingredients first, and then put them away as I go.



I bought those bananas, the ripest ones at the store, on Wednesday so that they would be soft by this morning. After preheating the oven, I mixed up the dry ingredients:



then mashed up the bananas:



and mixed everything together:



and put it in a bread loaf pan:



and popped it into the oven for an hour.

While it's cooking, let's talk about the books I read in February, since it's also the end of the month. I only made it through two books this month, mostly because things were busy at work and I was often too tired when I got home to stay up and read.

The month started with the news that Mary Higgins Clark passed away, and I realized I had Death Wears a Beauty Mask on my shelf of unread books. It's a short story collection featuring the title novella and other stories, some of which are interesting, but some of which seem like they could have used a little more work. Overall, the collection was a mixed bag, but reading it still felt like a nice sendoff to a beloved author. I've been reading Mary Higgins Clark's books since I was in high school, when I received several of them in a box of books my grandmother gave me. While my library has been a little pared down over the years, I still have all of those.

The other book I read this month was a reread of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my all time favorite books in the world. Throughout the month of February I tried to figure out if I was rereading the book because I was melancholy, or if I was melancholy because I was reading the book, but that may be an unanswerable question.

Enough about books, though, because the bread was done:



I think I might need to lower the racks in my oven, because the top of that is really brown and I think it might be too close to the heating element. By the time I got it to the house and sliced it, though, it seemed fine:



and my friends ate all of it.

I brought home an empty loaf pan.