I ran across this book the other day.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
I’m not sure what to make of it, frankly.
Though, really, it’s hard not to like a book that begins: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
I didn’t really make Purple Kale Pulao. As my mother would say: I looked at the recipe, and then changed it.
Actually, no one but me likes peas, so that was out, and I had some cabbage and some really fat (but, as it turned out, nicely tender) asparagus that needed cooking, so I added those. I also don’t apparently have any star anise in my spice drawer. (My spice drawer is a thing of wonder: quite a bit like Grandma’s in Dandelion Wine
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We were invited to dye eggs with our friends the other night, so we brought dinner (Mujadara, cucumber-tomato salad, and broiled pineapple), and then we dyed eggs. My friend is a scrapbooker (scrapper?) and had lots of really fun stickers to use as resists.
Farmerteen’s pièce de résistance is that shockingly red egg in the back, that says “Vampire” in funky lettering. Having made the hideously ugly brown egg with pink flowers (foreground, left), I moved on to the “whatever” egg.
Michael, ever the surehanded showoff, did double and triple coloured dipping.
My friend Alan and I have had a two-decade long conversation on the topic of missionary letters, as he is a writer of them, and I am a receiver of them. Missionary letters have long irritated me with their vague spiritual-jargon.
Dear Partners in Prayer,
God is teaching me many things through the challenges He sends my way. I praise Him for His faithfulness in helping me overcome the obstacles. We continue to work hard in the field for the harvest, and are making progress in the village of SanTaoGoWanIski, and covet your prayers . . .
et cetera, so on and so forth, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
I would much prefer one that was more brutally honest, and less vague:
Dear Person-I-Would-Like-to-Have-Send-Me-Money/Continue-To-Receive-Money-From;
I wish I understood how cleaning toilets every morning with a toothbrush meshed with the ministry I thought I was coming out here to do. I try not to have a sullen attitude while I’m doing it, but some days, it’s just too much. The village of SanTaoGoWanIski is full of people who were happy with their lives before we got here, and who, though they are charmed by the puppet shows and awed by the movies we show on a large sheet in the jungle over the roar of the generator, only answer the altar call out of politeness.
Something like that.
A young woman of my acquaintance (the youngest of the Clan de Baldwini, about whom much has been written on the 52) wrote this on Facebook about her mission trip to Mexico. It’s not as bleak as my version, but I think it’s on the right track. (Not that I think missionary letters need to be bleak, just that this one has that ring of honesty to it that I so desire and admire in a missionary letter).
Mara was chased by a chicken, sunburned within an inch of her life, had her world view changed, thought she was going to die, saw a roaming ostrich, rode in the back of an open truck, threw trash into a cess pool, cried, laughed, slept. All in all a fantastic mission trip. Thanks to everyone who prayed for me! (And that chicken was going for blood, so I’m lucky I’m alive).
Farmerteen and her father have no sense of their appendages. I used to joke, of Farmertot, that if her arms and legs and head weren’t stuck on, I’d just be toting around a torso . . . the rest would have been lost along the way.
Neither Farmerteen nor Michael really “feel” their fingers as being part of themselves.
If they lace their fingers like this
they cease to be their fingers.
If you point at an individual finger, and ask them to lift it, they really can’t . . . they can’t tell which is which. I’m surprised that Michael hasn’t lost a few in the woodworking.
For Farmerteen, I’m pretty sure her little fingers and ring fingers are just lagniappe, and that she doesn’t use them at all. For that matter, I’m not sure she doesn’t consider the middle finger on each hand to just “be in the way” as well.
(The black fingernail is from a firewood accident that can be attributed to someone else’s lack of attention, and not Farmerteen’s. Unfortunately for Farmerteen, she does still have feeling in her fingers, even if she doesn’t use them and can’t identify them).
She wasn’t too happy that I was taking pictures, but I wanted to capture how she holds her fork.
She holds her pencils similarly weirdly . . . I can’t ever duplicate it myself when I want to. It might be that my fingers just don’t move in those directions . . . I’m not sure.
I watched a really tender vampire movie the other day called Let the Right One In. The Netflix version is dubbed to English, which is kind of a shame, because I think that tends to bollocks the whole soundtrack, but that’s the version I had. It’s also very slow moving, as European movies tend to be to an American audience, but it was also quite sweet.
Penn Gillette on evangelism.
I made this polenta lasagna the other night.
I didn’t have mushrooms, and Farmerteen hates olives, so I swapped out the schrooms for red peppers and added two Italian fieldroast links.
We’ve decided to drop Fuhrman and go with the Atkins diet.
(This piece is by Nicole Rubel; check out her lovely work at www.nicolerubel.com).
Forget this leafy green stuff. We want meat, with bacon on it.
No more vegetables.
We want meat, with lots of fat.
No more leafy greens.
Everything is better with butter. Garlic butter. Sugar butter. Buttery butter.
And we can polish it all off with this new drink from Coca-Cola:
I wanted to make Samosas (I’d really go for a mimosa, too, but that’s a separate idea).
Ingredients
* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 chopped onion
* 1 potato, diced into 1/4″ pieces, cooked until tender
* 1 can garbanzo beans, drained
* 2 tablespoons sweet curry powder
* water
* egg roll wrappers
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Saute onion until browned, about 5 minutes. Reduce heat and add garbanzo beans and potatoes. Mix curry powder with 1/4 cup water until smooth, then add to skillet. Simmer mixture 10 minutes, stirring frequently and adding more water as needed to keep mixture moist.
3. Spoon mixture into egg roll wrappers and roll as if for eggrolls, using a small amount of water to seal the ends. Place on silpat or parchment lined baking sheet.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes.
If you want the wrappers to brown, you’ll need to brush them with butter or oil, but I didn’t, and they tasted just fine (and were less oily), but they don’t really brown.
I served them with green salad and Major Grey’s Chutney.
In the future, I’ll probably let them sit for 10 or 15 minutes before serving, because they were really hot.
