Mom's Banana Bread

My mom makes the best banana bread. Hands down. The recipe is a family secret, so this may be my last post as I'm sure I will need to go into Witness Protection - if my mom doesn't kill me first. Joking aside, this really is the best banana bread ever. My Aunt Pickle will break her "meat only" diet for this bread. I'd also like to apologize for the overdone appearance of the bread, I heard the timer go off and was in the middle of something else... 15 minutes later, I remembered...

1/2 cup shortening [mom uses Blue Bonnet, I use butter if I don't have BB]
2 mashed bananas
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 degs. Grease and flour bread pan.

Mix ingredients in order until smooth. [Fine, if you want to, cream the shortening, bananas, eggs and sugar then gradually add the flour, baking soda and salt, slowly add milk during each flour addition.]

Pour into bread pan and bake for 1 hour.

Cool on wire rack.

Creamy Corn Chowder

I was skeptical about this recipe because it has creamed corn in it (I'm not a fan), but I gave it a go to round out my menu options. I'm glad I did because it truly turned out like chowder and other than a slight sweetness the creamed corn didn't distract me from inhaling this soup. This chowder is versatile as cooked chicken could be added to it to make it a meal or it would be great served as a first course to grilled chicken and asparagus. Changes to original recipe are noted in brackets.

Cooking spray [omitted]
1 tbsp. light tub margarine [used butter]
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup diced celery
1-1/4 cups water
1 small baking potato, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes, about 1 cup
14 oz. (approx) can no-salt-added cream-style corn, undrained [no idea how you would drain it anyways and I used regular creamed corn]
1-1/2 cups frozen whole-kernel corn, thawed
1-2 tsp sugar [used slightly less than 1]
1 tsp salt-free powdered chicken bouillon [used 1 cube]
1/4 tsp salt [skipped because creamed corn and bouillon was not salt-free]
1/8 tsp white pepper [used black, would use more for personal taste]
1 cup half and half
1 tbsp all-purpose flour
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley [used 1 tbsp dried]

Lightly spray a medium saucepan with cooking spray. [skipped because my pan was teflon coated] Melt the margarine over medium heat. Add the onion and celery. Cook for 5 minutes, or until soft but not brown, stirring occasionally. Stir in the water, potato, both corns, sugar, bouillon, salt and pepper. Increase the heat to medium high and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are just tender, stirring occasionally.

Pour the half-and-half into a small bowl and whisk in the flour. Stir into the soup. Sitr in the parsley. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the soup has thickened, stirring frequently.

Recipe from American Heart Association Heart-Healthy Recipes, 2011

Orange Fruit Dip

This went together very quickly. The kids and I tried it with apples, vanilla wafers and Liebniz crackers (cookies. biscuits. whatever). I liked it best with the wafers and crackers - so I think it goes best when paired with sweeter fruit such as bananas or strawberries. The dip did seem runny, I'm not sure if that's my inability to boil things for the required amount of time or if there's too much liquid in the recipe. Next time, I'm going to decrease the orange juice just a bit, as well as the orange and lemon peel, I felt it was too overwhelming. As far as fruit dip goes though, it didn't make the kids favorite list.

1 cup sugar
2 tbsp plus 1 tsp cornstarch
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup orange juice [try 3/4 cup next time]
1/2 cup water
juice from two lemons
1/2 tsp grated orange peel [next time cut amount in half]
1/2 tsp grated lemon peel [next time cut amount in half]
Assorted fresh fruit, crackers, etc. for dipping

In a small sauce pan (not over heat), combine sugar, cornstarch and salt; stir in the orange juice, water, lemon juice and orange and lemon peel until blended.

Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened.

Cover and refrigerate until chilled.

Serve with fruit or other fun dipping foods.

Recipe from Taste of Home Good Food Kids Love Oct 2006

Keeping the House

Keeping the House: A Novel by Ellen Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Technically, I read 75% of this book in 2011. Minor detail aside... I was intimidated by the size of this book and the switching timelines of the story. Under normal conditions I wouldn't have chosen this book, but it was the selection for book club so I sucked it up. I was glad I did. This story had rich characters set in an active history period - through WWI, WWII and the aftermath of the war. The shifting timeline was well done and worked with the multiple storylines running through the book. The story climax was well done and the ending well satisfied. A very good read on so many levels.

Synopsis: When Dolly Magnuson moves to Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, in 1950, she discovers all too soon that making marriage work is harder than it looks in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Dolly tries to adapt to her new life by keeping the house, supporting her husband’s career, and fretting about dinner menus. She even gives up her dream of flying an airplane, trying instead to fit in at the stuffy Ladies Aid quilting circle. Soon, though, her loneliness and restless imagination are seized by the vacant house on the hill. As Dolly’s life and marriage become increasingly difficult, she begins to lose herself in piecing together the story of three generations of Mickelson men and women: Wilma Mickelson, who came to Pine Rapids as a new bride in 1896 and fell in love with a man who was not her husband; her oldest son, Jack, who fought as a Marine in the trenches of World War I; and Jack’s son, JJ, a troubled veteran of World War II, who returns home to discover Dolly in his grandparents’ house.

As the crisis in Dolly’s marriage escalates, she not only escapes into JJ’s stories of his family’s past but finds in them parallels to her own life. As Keeping the House moves back and forth in time, it eloquently explores themes of wartime heroism and passionate love, of the struggles of men’s struggles with fatherhood and war and of women’s conflicts with issues of conformity, identity, forbidden dreams, and love.

Recommended Reading:
The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison
I Gave My Heart to Know This by Ellen Baker
The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor
Apart from the Crowd by Anna McPartlin
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
Gone with the Windsors by Laurie Graham

January's Books

I've been off work since Dec. 22nd. I go back tomorrow, as painful as it's going to be, I'm looking forward to having a structured day again. I had big plans for my time off: finish Christmas shopping, Christmas at two houses, cleaning my house thoroughly, stripping the wall paper in the laundry room, washing light fixtures and reading, reading, reading. I had hoped to get through the books I was currently reading, and possibly read the Stephen King book that has been on my night stand forever... but I was derailed by death. I mean sickness. At one point I was pretty sure I was going to die. Or at least everyone around me was wishing that I would.

When I came back to life three days later, I had to play catch up on a few things. I successfully crossed most things off my list - pretty much everything EXCEPT thoroughly cleaning my house, although I did make a nice dent in it. I even replaced a kitchen faucet. By myself! So now I can use my dishwasher again. I'm feeling kind of spoiled right now - The Boyfriend bought and installed a garage door opener AND a remote car starter for me. What am I going to do with all this free time?!

Oh, anyways, back to the book thing. Instead of finishing the books I was currently reading, I dove into the Book Club selection for January. Because it was HUGE (500+ pages) and I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish it in time when I got back to normal life. Anyways, the point of this is... I forgot. Oh! Yeah. January's reading may not go quite as planned because I have three books to finish and I didn't read the Stephen King book, which is HUGE, so now I'm going to read these in January. The Stephen King book totally qualifies as old because it's been on my shelf for 2-1/2 years. Same for Lenz. The Jodi Picoult book is a little harder to justify, but because I started the book in the "old year", I'm making it work for me. So, without further ado... here is the adjusted book list for January:

1. Keeping The House by Ellen Baker (Book Club Selection)
2. Lenz by Georg Buechner
3. House Rules by Jodi Picoult
4. Skeleton Crew by Stephen King
5. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
6. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
7. The Starlet by Mary McNamara
8. The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters by Lorraine Lopez
9. If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now by Claire LaZebnik
10. My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

Obviously this is the full list to be split between January and July, but I can pull any book I want out of this list in any order. It's going to be a controlled chaos.

File This Under...

Book Challenges. I've done a few in my day. Generally I fail at them. Case in point, last year's Self Challenge. Heck, I can't even ban myself from buying more books. The last few years I've challenged myself with a goal of books to read, starting in 2006 with a 104 book challenge, I've tweaked it over the years depending on what's going on in my life.

This year I'm going to try something different. An idea I got, believe it or not, from a book I didn't really care for. The Happiness Project was a book about a woman's twelve month journey to find what made her happy. I know that books make me happy. I also know that I get anxious when my TBR shelf gets out of hand. So, I'm combining the two goals to get things back to Happy All The Time. So, here's the basics:

• a genre for each month
• a set number of books for that month
• one little exception: I will have one book each month that is different than the genre for book club

January and July: The genre is Old Books. (In my world, this is a genre, deal with it.) I'll be reading the books that have been around the longest on my TBR shelf. The goal is 10 books total for the two months.

February and August: The genre is Favorite Books. I'll be reading books that have been on my re-read list for some time: Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, Harry Potter, and Charles Dickens. The goal is 6 books total. (Dude, the Outlander and HP books are HUUUGE. Six books are going to be a challenge.)

March and September: The genre is Self-Help. I'll be reading books either from my personal shelf or from the library at work. The goal is 8 books total.

April and December: The genre is Trashy Romance Novels. I used to read these books exclusively. Now I read them sporadically. I have quite a few of them hanging around, most of them quick Harlequin reads. The goal is 12 books total.

May and June: The genre is Oddo. I can read any genre book as long as it's on my Nook (named Oddo). These will mostly be books that I have purchased but may also include library books. The goal is 8 books total.

October and November: The genre is Writing. I have quite a few books that I picked up for research and reference for writing my novel. October I'll spend reading those books. November I'll spend writing for NaNoWriMo. The goal is 3 books.

This brings my total goal to 47 books for the year. This should be completely do-able, even with taking a month off to write.

In a Quandary

I have a little bit of a dilemma. No, maybe that's too dramatic. It's really more of a puzzler. Or maybe it's just my OCD flaring up... I have three books from 2011 that I haven't finished. THREE. One book is dangerously close (within 100 pages) to being done, but the other two are, well, no where near close. They are so far from close that if they were arranged alphabetically, they'd start with the letter Z. I don't want to put either of these books down, but I also have a little book challenge going on [details coming later today] and finishing these two books would seriously derail the challenge. Oh what to do what to do! Sigh.

quan·da·ry/ˈkwänd(ə)rē/

Noun:	Perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation: "Jim is in a quandary". A difficult situation; a practical dilemma.
Synonyms:	perplexity - embarrassment - dilemma - puzzle "Quandary" is a funny sounding word. I had to look it up to check my spelling. I thought I'd include the Dictionary entry.